THE 
UNCIVILWAR 

PORTER 




BROWNE 





Class J3_Si,_^ 
Book /Q^aS 

COPmiGHT DEPOSm 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 



PORTER EMERSON BROWNE 



THE 

UNCIVIL WAR 

BY 

PORTER EMERSON BROWNE 

AUTHOR OF " SCARS AND STRIPES." ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAY kO iSiB 



COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918, 
BY THE McCLURE PUBLICATIONS, INC. 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



©CLA499320 



%' 



TO 

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE 

WHO MADE POSSIBLE THIS VOLUME 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

One 


The Uncivil War 


PAGE 
II 


Two 


Plain Bill Hohenzollern 


39 


Three 


Please Face Right! . 


6i 


Four 


The Alcoholocaust . 


75 


Five 


Extravagance vs. Economy 


lOI 


Six 


The Foreign Language Press 


• 123 


Seven 


Cabaretrogression 


. 143 


Eight 


E. Flurribus Unum! . 


. 167 



CHAPTER ONE 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 

CHAPTER ONE 

THE UNCIVIL WAR 

**/^^NE of the main reasons why America has 
V^ had such a hard time getting into this war," 
said my friend, thoughtfully, " is that, when they 
started the present world conflict, the Germans 
sprung on humanity an entirely new kind of war. 
And one so amazingly different from any war with 
which Americans had ever been connected that 
for a long time they didn't believe what they were 
seeing was really so — like the farmer who gazing 
upon a giraffe for the first time, waggled his head 
and remarked, weakly, *Go on! There ain't no 
such animal ! ' 

'* Up to August, 1914,'" he went on, " war had 
been a very simple and elementary sort of affair, 
much like a fist fight, on a large scale. Two nations 
got sore at each other. And bango ! they went at it, 
horse, foot and dragons; fist, feet and paving blocks; 
no holds barred and the devil take the undermost! 

11 



12 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

Men were simply men; and nations simply men en 
masse, having the same qualities, the same ideas, the 
same ideals, the same tempers and the same tem- 
peraments that had governed their actions, in civil 
life with, added to them, the new qualities that their 
new life had adduced. 

" Going to war didn't change them. They were 
the same men they had been before, only now 
engaged in a different occupation. Consequently 
they brought with them into this new business the 
same virtues and the same vices that had been theirs 
all along. If their word had been good before, it 
was good now. If they had been kindly and merci- 
ful before, they were kindly and merciful now. 
And if, by reason of being brutal, or untrustworthy, 
or treacherous, or mean, or mendacious, they had 
been scowled on by their comrades in times of peace, 
so were they scowled on by their comrades in time 
of war. War wasn't a new and highly specialized 
occupation, demanding a whole new set of emotions, 
ideas and ethics; it was merely a new application of 
the old emotions, ideas and ethics. Consequently, 
in the old days, a man beat his ploughshare into a 
sword, and went slamming away gaily at his foe; 
and when he had completely and successfully licked 
that foe, he beat his sword back into a ploughshare 
and went back to work again. Women and children 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 13 



entered into wars in those days not at all. They 
comprized the audience. It was not thought neces- 
sary to slaughter little children asleep in bed that 
the common ideals of a nation's manhood might be 
realized. As a matter of fact, the slaughter of 
women and children was frowned upon. It was 
deemed, and rightly, that the common ideals of a 
nation's manhood that comprized any such low- 
down trick as murdering women and children were 
not worthy of realization in the first place. The 
men just got together and fought it out. And when 
one side was licked, that side acknowledged it; and 
the other side complimented it on the game fight it 
had put up. And they shook hands and went home 
to their regular business of running a corner grocery, 
or a railroad, or something. 

"Consider for a moment. Barring the Indian 
wars, which were a simple process, and a sort of 
combination of being waylaid by a thug and having 
your hair cut by a cursory barber, we find that our 
first so-called regular war was the one yclept 
Revolutionary. 

" This was the simplest known form of war — a 
sort of Type I A. In this war, any man that had 
a squirrel rifle, a couple of pounds of powder, a 
handful of bullets, a good heart and a sense of duty 
became automatically a soldier. And, be it added 



14 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

in those days the aforesaid accoutrements were as 
component a part of the equipment of any gentle- 
man as are now a safety razor and a bank account. 

" Whereby, in that period, going to war was a 
simple thing. All a man had to do was to grab his 
equipment in one hand, kiss his wife with the other, 
go out and hide behind a stone wall and slam loose 
at the first man he saw coming down the road all 
dressed up like a target. 

" It took thirty-seven minutes to load one of the 
cannon of the day with a ball that looked like a 
close-up of a liver pill, and anybody that was a suf- 
ficiently good runner to keep a half a mile between 
himself and his enemy was comparatively safe. 
And fighting became so much like doing a Mara- 
thon, that the enemy, who were accustomed to train 
on beer, mixed ale, beer, roast beef, beer, mashed 
potato, beer, custard pie, beer, nuts, beer, raisins, 
beer, comfits and beer, lost all enthusiasm after the 
first few miles and went back to winter quarters on 
the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, which 
was then the Heart of the City, and sat the war out 
in a cold and haughty indifference. When Corn- 
wallis surrendered at Yorktown, they were disap- 
pointed but not surprised. 

" Our next experience was with the Mexican War. 
We read about it in the newspapers. 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 15 

" Then came the Civil War. 

" The Civil War v^as our first, last and only real 
war. As to why it was called a civil war, was al- 
ways more or less of a mystery until we had the 
German, or Uncivil, war with which to contrast 
it. . . . After looking at the Made in Germany 
product any little old war looks civil, even polite, 
and you might go so far as to say punctilious. 

" Not that there was not much bloodshed, much 
bitterness, in the Civil War. There was. And 
yet it was still the primitive form of war, as were 
indeed all wars until there came upon a stricken 
world the new patent, with Made in Germany 
stamped upon its bloody base. The Civil War was 
a war of fighting and of killing. But it was a war 
of man against man, virile, clean and as merciful as 
war can be made. 

" It was, like the other wars of our ancestors, 
simple, manly, honourable war made necessary, as 
indeed has war always been made necessary when 
necessary it has been made, by the blindness and 
folly of an overweening adversary. 

" So much for the wars that we had known. And 
now to consider the new war — the super war of the 
German. 

'' In order for us to regard the subject compre- 
hendingly and understandingly, suppose we go back 



16 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

and consider the question, ' What is war in the first 
place ? ' 

" Reduced to its simplest terms, war is the con- 
flict of ideas physically demonstrated. In other 
words, war is a difference of opinion translated into 
physical action. 

" For example, you and I have an argument. 

" Being a couple of rational human beings with a 
distinct aversion to black eyes and bloody noses, we 
sit quietly down and discuss the matter. If we 
agree, well and good. If not, we part with mutual 
disrespect, and no harm is done. 

" But suppose, we are not rational human beings. 
Suppose we are irrational, like most human beings. 
We start in to argue. But, argument getting us 
nowhere, we begin to get mad. I call you names. 
You call me names back. Then I cuss at you. And 
you cuss back. That makes me madder; so I give 
you a poke in the nose. That makes you madder, 
and you kick me in the shins. And then, in a split 
second, we're rolling on the floor, hitting and biting 
and gouging, and the war is on ! 

" And the reason for this is that while life has 
its mental and its spiritual side as well as its phys- 
ical, the physical side is the final expression of the 
physical in the physical world. 

" The spiritual quality is by far the highest in 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 17 

man. The mental comes next. But both of these 
facets of the individual are abstract. When a party 
wants to get concrete action, he busts loose into the 
physical. Neither spirituality nor mentality ever 
chopped a cord of wood, or killed a chicken, or 
cashed a check at the bank. It is a physical world 
in which we live ; and physical things must be phys- 
ically done. 

" Not that we do not recognize the spiritual and 
the mental. The spiritual and the mental are to the 
physical precisely what the captain and the engineer 
are to the ship. The one guides, the other controls, 
the physical thing in which they live. But the 
physical and the mental cannot control unless they 
are in direct application to, and coordinated with, 
the physical; the captain and the engineer couldn't 
run the ship if they were seated thirty-two miles 
away, in the back room of a saloon, or a beauty 
parlour, or a Society of the Friends of the Universal 
Dove, or something, any more than they could 
stop a runaway horse by sitting on the front-porch 
and thinking how benighted it is of horses to run 
away; no more than you can prevent a Nubian lion 
from eating you by calling upon the forces of spirit- 
uality to make him desist. Spirituality may be your 
game. But it's over the lion's head. All he under- 
stands is the physical, and plenty of it. Your soul 



18 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

may go marching on. But your short ribs and your 
loin chops will form pleasant pabulum for his leo- 
nine family against the hungers of the coming morn. 

" It is at this interesting, and you might even say 
crucial, point that fall down so hard on their concave 
brows the Amos Pinchots and the Jane Addamses 
of the period. They reason that because they deem 
themselves solely and potently spiritual, they can 
stay at home and guide the ship, and heave coal 
under its engines merely by sending out thought 
waves. They reason that because they are spiritual, 
all the rest of life, human and inhuman, must climb 
up to their level to attack them. Which is per- 
fectly sound reasoning, if, meanwhile, you are 
willing to let your physical being become the phys- 
ical prey of whoever and whatever wants to attack 
it physically. 

" For, deprecate the physical as you will, you've 
got to remember that your spirit would have a 
darned lonesome time at a bridge party if it didn't 
have your body to handle the cards and trump your 
partner's ace for it. I can imagine no greater 
height of futility than for a flock of bodiless spirits 
to sit around and try to knit actual mufflers for 
physical soldiers. 

*' No, sir, so long as you have a physical being, 
you've got to recognize and protect that physical 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 19 

being. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is to 
commit suicide and go back with the spirits where 
you belong. As long as the spiritual walks around 
in a physical envelope, it's got to protect that 
envelope physically if it wants to continue to walk 
around. The structure of physical life is like the 
structure of a physical building — only as firm as 
its physical foundation makes it. Amos and Jane 
may live with their spiritual heads in the clouds. 
But their physical feet are right down here on Main 
Street along with those of the rest of us. The fact 
that they can't see down as far as that doesn't 
change the fact in the least. Bryan can't see his 
feet either. But that doesn't mean that they aren't 
there. 

" Take children. Children, whose little brains 
are as yet undeveloped, naturally are very close to 
the physical. Spirituality develops with the intel- 
lect. But the physical is born within us. We eat 
before we think. Even as we think before we 
talk. — At least, some of us do. 

"Did you ever watch a bunch of children, at 
play? 

" A difference of opinion arises — about which 
one should have a certain lollypop; or not whisper 
to somebody else. 

" Do you, then, behold said adolescents going into 



20 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

a sombre tribunal as to the equities of the case? 
Do you see formed a juvenile Hague Tribunal to 
adjudicate the matter ? You do not. You see one 
child take a wallop at the other child's most ad- 
jacent portion. You see the other child put up a 
howl and wallop him back. And unless there be 
older and wiser heads to interfere, somebody's due 
to go home with a scratched nose and a puffed eye. 
Which is because only the physical is recognized by 
the physical. 

" And it is in this childish, impulsive, generous, 
viciousless warfare that has lain the only expe- 
rience with warfare that has been ours — that has 
been America's. 

'* But what, then, was Germany's idea of war? 

** It was not an idea that sprung to life full- 
blown, like Felix, or whoever it was, arising from 
the ashes. Forty years of incubation it took to 
bring it to its ghastly, amazing, horrible perfection. 

" ' War,' said this German Idea, forty years ago, 
* is hell. We are going to make war. Therefore 
we are going to raise, — I mean, make, — hell. And 
since we are going to raise, — I mean make, — hell, 
it's up to us to make the hottest and the helliest kind 
of a hell that German efficiency can manufacture — 
hell with the blower on, so to speak. Wherefore, 
let us get together all our hellish ingenuity and all 



THEUNCIYILWAR 21 

our hellish efficiency and all our hellish thorough- 
ness and make a new kind of Made in Germany hell 
that will make the old-fashioned orthodox English, 
or American, or French hell look like a home-made 
ice-box. 

" ' Of course,' went on the German Idea, * we 
can't hope to make so complete and perfect a hell 
as this right off the bat. It may take us years, or 
even decades, or generations. But make it we 
will!' 

"And they did! Of all the highly perfected 
products ever manufactured in Germany, this Ger- 
man Hellwar is the last word. 

"To make a war, the first thing that a nation 
must have is public opinion. 

" So the German idea subsidized the press ; cor- 
rupted the schools; debauched religion, art and 
science to its ends. 

"Then under the guise of a paternal interest in 
its subjects, it proceeded to educate, clothe and feed 
its people. But there was a catch in it. It did not 
let them educate themselves. It educated them. 
Which is another way of saying that it did not teach 
them to think ; but thought for them. It furnished 
them thoughts as it furnished them food and 
clothes. And as the German people accepted the 
one, so did they accept the others. 



22 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

"It taught them that they were a super race of 
super men. It taught them that they were God's 
chosen people. It taught them that what they did, 
and were told to do, was right because it was God's 
wish. It turned an apparently domestic nation into 
a race of pure religious fanatics, save that the 
Fatherland was their God, instead of God Him- 
self. 

"In so teaching, they found that the accepted 
standards of rnorals and ethics of other nations did 
not coincide with effective pursuance of the plans 
they had in mind. So they substituted others, that 
did. 

" It was right to kill, if for the Kaiser and Ger- 
many. It was right to rape, and murder, and burn 
and torture if it made for the successful material 
advancement of the Kaiser and the Fatherland. 
Your oath and your pledged word were nothing if 
they stood between you and the course the Kaiser 
and the Fatherland had chosen to pursue. 

" Slaughter and slavery terrify conquered peo- 
ples. Germany must conquer peoples. Germany 
must terrify conquered peoples to keep them con- 
quered. Therefore it is right for Germany to 
slaughter and enslave conquered peoples. 

" As simple as two and two ! Isn't it ? 

" By controlling the destinies of all her inmates ; 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 23 

by a system of mental, moral, ethical, artistic and re- 
ligious soup kitchens, the German Idea saw that the 
brain of the German nation was fed only the 
mental food that it wanted it to have. And as 
what goes into the stomach forms the blood, so what 
goes into the brain forms the ideas and ideals. 

" And the German Idea saw to it, and saw to it 
well, that there could exist in the hearts and souls 
of the people no love, no tenderness, no sympathy 
which would distract from the singleness of their 
purpose as religious fanatics and world masters. A 
man might love his wife to breed her for the Father- 
land. He might love his children for future cannon 
fodder. If there by any chance remained within 
him a further hunger for sentiment, it could be 
jazzed out of him with goose stepping and iron 
crosses, and in yelling his head off for the Kaiser 
and the Fatherland; which was by way of being 
what is commonly known as a whipsaw. The more 
of a sucker he became, the more he yelled for the 
Kaiser, and the more he yelled for the Kaiser, the 
more of a sucker he became. He was playing the 
middle from both ends; and was done before he 
started. 

" Furthermore, to satisfy what scruples of con- 
science he might have, if any, there was carefully 
inculcated into him the belief that God was a Ger*- 



24 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

man official who came in somewhere between the 
Kaiser and Von Hindenberg, and that anything the 
Kaiser ordered, God would O. K. without the slight- 
est hesitation. 

" Frightfulness? It is God's command, given 
through His commander-in-chief, the Kaiser ! 

" Non-combatants maimed and tortured ? 
Women with their breasts cut off? Little babies 
with bleeding stumps where once were hands ? The 
submarines with their toll of murdered women and 
children? Helpless crews ruthlessly drowned? 
Poison gas, and equally poison propaganda? The 
murder of the wounded upon the battlefields ? The 
bombardment of sleeping cities with gas and shrap- 
nel? Torture and crucifixion and starving of 
prisoners ? Servia, a butchered nation ? Armenia, 
weltering in the blood lust of its conquering foe? 
Belgium, raped and tortured and enslaved? Mur- 
der, and robbery and arson, pillage and rape and 
slaughter ? 

*' God commanded it, through His lord, the 
Kaiser ! 

*' Back to the very foundations of civilization it- 
self have ridden these two, the German Kaiser 
and his personal Gott, to tear down and de- 
spoil and ravish, with their hordes of slaves red- 
handed. 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 25 

"The foundation of civilization is the contract 
When you can take no man's word for anything, 
civilization ceases. 

" Civilization emerged from the bone-glutted 
caves of the past when the first man of the Stone 
Age said to his neighbour, ' I will not kill you if you 
will not kill me/ And when the second man gave, 
and kept, his word, civilization was born. 

" Not even so much of honour as was necessary 
to save its own life has Germany retained in its na- 
tional scheme of things. Its pledged word it has 
confessed to be valueless; even its own allies dis- 
trust and fear it. Nor any nation on earth has 
aught for Germany but hate, fear, distrust, con- 
tempt, loathing. It has come to be the one pariah 
nation that the world has ever known ! 

" Their Kaiser himself has said that the German 
sword shall make the world respect Germany ! 

" As though the sword ever made anybody respect 

anything Did the blacksnake whip make the 

slave respect its master? Fear, perhaps; but re- 
spect ? Never ! 

" So you can follow the cold German logic from 
which have been stripped all emotion, all decency, all 
morality, all idealism, all beauty, all humanity. So 
they have created a human machine, as merciless as 
a plague, as relentless as a flood, as impersonal as a 



26 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

famine. Neither youth nor age, good or bad, 
women nor boys, old men nor maidens, neither 
works of beauty nor labours of love it spares — a 
thing relentless, inhuman, unhuman, that would 
grind the world beneath its iron wheels and leave it 
but a bleeding pulp. 

" So the German Idea. Do you begin to see the 
wonderful, the amazing completeness? 

" First forty years of careful preparation, mental, 
immoral and physical. Forty years of painstaking 
corruption of an entire people through debauched 
newspapers, textbooks, churches. Forty years of 
bastardized art and distorted literature. Forty 
years of subtle and pleasant slavery of the brains 
and bodies of an entire race. Forty years 
of commercial, industrial and mechanical appli- 
cation. And out of all, the creation of a great 
incongruous, terrible Juggernaut with, for its crush- 
ing wheels millions of men, for its cogs millions of 
women, for its fuel miUions and more millions of 
children ! 

" In other wars, a small per cent of the male 
population of a nation went spontaneously to the 
front, with but very little preparation of any 
kind. 

" But here you have a nation of sixty-eight mil- 
lions of people going to war as a unit ! Merciless 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 27 

masters. Mental, moral, physical slaves. And re- 
ligious fanatics all! And if any one question the 
religious fanaticism, remind them that the very 
essence of all religious wars has been the ruthless 
destruction of the churches, the works of art, and 
the civilization of the conquered ; and let them think 
of Rheims, of Arras, or Louvain. 

" But in all the colossal, the marvellous, the amaz- 
ing completeness of their preparations, the Germans 
overlooked one bet. On one thing they did not 
figure. 

" It is sentiment. 

" Can you find within the German teachings, or 
documents, or pronunciamentos, or journals, or 
writings of the last generation any sort of human 
sentiment whatsoever? Is there anything of love, 
or pity, or compassion, of sympathy, or tenderness, 
or sorrow? 

*' Not so you could notice it ! It is Germany must 
have this, and Germany will have that. Those who 
stand against German might will be taught a bitter 
lesson. The German people are the chosen people 
of God who has absolutely no interest whatsoever 
in any other branch of the so-called human race. 
The only love they have had has been for them- 
selves ; the only pity or compassion for such of their 
own people who have made the blood sacrifice for 



28 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

their own crimes ; the only sorrow to their own fail- 
ure to ravish the world according to schedule. 

" The only sentiment that the once sentimental 
(along certain pompous, or household, lines) Ger- 
man people have retained has been perverted into a 
sort of megalomaniacal paranoia of self-aggran- 
dizement and takes the form of being willing to 
allow themselves and their children to murder and 
to be murdered if it will but add to the glory of 
the Kaiser and to the well-known reputation for 
gentleness, modesty, tenderness, forbearance and 
loving kindness of the misunderstood German race. 
They will buy Christmas gifts for their own chil- 
dren. But Belgian babies they hang on hooks out- 
side butcher shops. 

" In the grotesque obsession that has come upon 
them every tenet, every creed of honourable warfare 
has been lost. Anything, any means, no matter how 
horrible, how bestial, to win! The absolute elimi- 
nation of sane sentiment. Insane logic reduced to 
the nth power, and beyond ! 

" This, then, their great mistake. 

" For, be it known, life is half practical, half 
sentimental. And in the fair middle ground that 
lies between must one live who would live life as life 
must be lived. And when man puts out of 
his life sentiment and softness, placing in its stead 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 29 

but the cold mercilessness of logic, it may mark in 
some ways a great strength, but it marks a greater 
weakness. 

"In proof of this you have but to consider 
grandma. If you are a pure sentimentalist, when 
the dear old lady gets along in years, you close up 
the shop and stay home all day holding her hand and 
bust yourself buying her flowers, and port wine and 
antimacassars and things. If, on the other hand, 
you are a pure practicalist, you figure that since the 
old dame is too antique to bear children and take in ' 
washing, the best thing you can do is to take her out 
in the backyard and shoot her. 

" So, you see, it is in the middle ground, and only 
there, that lies salvation for both her and your- 
self. 

" Sentiment is soul. Sentiment is the earthly 
manifestation of spirituality. Show me a good 
man; and I will show you a spiritual man. Show 
me a great man; and I will show you a spiritual 
man ; show me a man whose work will live upon the 
earth, and I will show you a spiritual man. 
Through all the ages it is the work of the spiritually 
and the sentimentally balanced that has lived. And 
those who have murdered love with logic, pity with 
ruthlessness, compassion with ambition, mercy with 
hate, have ever gone down, trampled in the dust of 



30 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

their own defeats. Where is Washington to- 
day? . . . And where Attila? 

" And the reason ? It is very simple. It is be- 
cause the sentiment that means spirituality is the 
pilot of the ship. Throw overboard the pilot, and 
the ship may run for a time. But in the end, no 
matter how great, how perfect the ship, no matter 
how competent the engineer, it will go upon the 
rocks. Only the pilot knows how to navigate the 
oceans of the world. As only the spirit knows how 
to sail the seas of life. 

" And so it is with Germany. Blindly efficient 
in mind and work, yet is she blind in spirit. Of all 
the sentiment that should be hers, she has but the 
blind lust for spoil, for riches, for dominion. She 
wants nothing spiritual. Has she ever said so? 
Has she ever cried out for the rights of free peoples ? 
For the benefits of universal peace? Is there be- 
hind all her bloody mouthings anything of making 
the world better for old men, for old women, for 
little children? 

" Her talk is only of boundaries ; of commerce; of 
wealth; physical, physical, and more physical. Et 
praeterea nihil. She wants only to feed her own 
slaves into the gaping maw of War until, of its very 
glut, it shall loll upon its swinish side, and let her 
have for her own the booty of the world. That is 



THEUNCIVILWAR 31 

all. . . . This world is all she asks. Of what may 
lie beyond, she thinks no more than thinks the lion, 
or the wolf. . . . 

" But it is this very sentiment that marks the dif- 
ference between man and beast. So that, when the 
Germans flung from themselves, with the useless 
panoply of peace, this same sentiment, they tore 
down the very barrier that separated them from the 
beast. It is possible for any man, who denies his 
soul, and recognizes only his body, his bodily desires 
and his bodily lusts, to become as the beast, and 
worse. For he has a man's brain with which to out- 
animalize the beast itself. Even as he can grow 
beauty in his soul, he can grow hair upon his body 
and claws upon his hands. . . . And this, autoc- 
racy stands ever ready to help him do. . . . And 
man grows toward the beast. 

" And this, democracy cannot do. Man's instinct 
is toward good. His instinct is toward the spiritual 
and the sentimental. His soul in times of trouble 
turns to the Mystery of Life, hoping for comfort, 
praying for consolation and for surcease. In a 
democracy, man creates his own ideals; thinks his 
own thoughts. And so he grows. And toward the 
spiritual. 

'' True it is that democracies are lower in military 
efficiency; in tribal coordination. But they are 



32 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

raised, meantime, in the spirituality that, after all, 
is the governing force of earthly life. And so it 
turns out that what is in the beginning, democracy's 
weakness, turns out in the end to be its strength. 
The beast can fight. But man has ever vanquished 
beast because, while he can assume so far as he 
needs must, the qualities of the beast, he has other 
qualities that the beast lacks. The beast fights with 
ferocity, man with courage and with patience. 
The beast flings itself upon its prey. Man presses 
slowly to the kill. The beast has blood lust. Man 
has vision. The beast wants but to destroy. 
Man desires to build. As the centuries have 
taught us, life cherishes man. But beasts he de- 
stroys. 

" And that is why the men of France and England 
and America and Italy — the men of democracy! — 
will subdue in the end the tiger of Germany, and the 
jackals of Austria and Hungary and Turkey and 
Bulgaria. 

** And what will come of it all? this bath of blood 
in which the world has been plunged ? 

"Who knows? 

** But one thing we should remember. It is this : 
That it is but a few centuries, since no peace-loving 
man upon this earth went to his toil of a morning 
save with a weapon in his hand, and dread within his 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 33 

heart. War was the one business upon this earth to 
which a gentleman might aspire. And peace but the 
necessary interval of recuperation from the latest 
war, and preparation for the coming. Warfare was 
normality, peace an abnormal condition that meant 
merely suspense. 

■ * It is these facts that make the more bitterly in- 
congruous the present belief among certain men here 
in America that the present war will end war upon 
this earth ; men who thereby take their stand against 
universal military training and service. 

" The wish, in his good time, has fathered many 
a thought. But none more understandably fatuous, 
more sympathetically fallacious, than this! 

" The fact that a few nations have grown in moral 
idealistic stature until they have attained an ap- 
preciation and an understanding of the values and 
blessings of peace to a point where they have been 
willing to lay themselves defenceless to, and helpless 
before, war, does not mean that war has vanished, 
or will vanish, from the world. More hkely, if we 
continue to lie down in a supine and fatuous help- 
lessness in the very maws of death, peace will vanish 
from the earth ; as indeed, it has. 

" The lamb of peace does not, merely by disbeliev- 
ing in the lion of war, rid the world of him. The 
lion eats the lamb and rids the world of peace. 



34 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

"A world police force may be possible. It may- 
be effective for a time. And yet what is to prevent 
half of the world policemen from getting together 
and making war on the other half? 

" A world tribunal we had. But what happens 
if the criminal nation refuses to permit his case to be 
adjudicated and elects to fight? Which is pre- 
cisely what did happen, and is happening now. 

" Man is but human. A chain is only as strong 
as its weakest link. 

" Who shall control Russia, drunk in her debauch 
of unaccustomed democracy? Who shall control 
Mexico ? How large a police force must we have to 
control a criminal nation of ninety millions of peo- 
ple, or of a hundred and eighty millions? which 
refuses to be arrested and come along peace- 
ably? 

" When may not another ruler come, like the 
Kaiser, to debauch a nation into a gang of mur- 
derers? When may not another plot against the 
peace of the world be hatched, and planned, and 
sprung, mightier than the forces organized to sup- 
press and control it ? 

'' Who, of us of America, is wise enough to know 
what the future has in store and when it will unstore 
it? 

" But one thing we do know. Washington said 



THE UNCIVIL WAR 35 

to this the country that he upbuilt, ' In time of peace, 
prepare for war.' 

" Whatever others may think, I hold that Wash- 
ington was no fool. Washington knew the world, 
and its politics. Beyond that, he knew human 
nature. 

'* By disregarding his advice we have been caught 
once in the humiliating position where only the 
navy of England and the gallant armies of France 
have stood between us and the murder of our men, 
the rape of our women, the mutilation of our chil- 
dren. Shall we be so fatuous, so supine, so utterly 
without vision, as to make the same mistake again? 

" We should have Universal Military Training 
and Service, Not the training and service that of 
necessity means war. But the training and service 
that mean protection from war; that mean national 
spirit; that mean health and strength and honour 
and realization to our boys and our men, to our 
girls and our women; the training and service that, 
for the first time in our national life have really 
made our melting pot actually melt ! 

" This training and this service we should have. 
We should have it now. And we should have it 
for all time 1 " 



CHAPTER TWO 



PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 



CHAPTER TWO 

PLAIN BILL IIOHENZOLLERN 

MY friend shook his head sadly. 
"What's the matter?" I queried. 

" Did you ever stop to think," he asked, " how 
deeply, and how thoroughly almost everything in 
this world is concealed beneath a mass of hokum, 
buncombe and claptrap ? " 

I waited. 

** When a surgeon wants to find out what's the 
matter with a man's body," my friend continued, 
''he peels off the man's clothes and goes over him 
with a clinical thermometer and a stethoscope. But 
when the world wants to find out what's the matter 
with a man's soul, it is perfectly willing to examine 
him through a criminal record, a sob squad or a 
couple of bales of gold lace, as the case may be. It 
escapes the eyes of the world completely that a man 
is merely a man, born of woman, with two legs and 
two arms and a couple of eyes and a more or less 
rotten disposition; that it makes no difference 
whether he was born in a mansion or a manger, 
whether his father was a king or a carpenter, or 



40 THEUNCIYILWAR 

whether he was born with a gold spoon in his mouth 
or only a tongue. 

" No, the poor, old besotted world goes on giving 
each and every individual a cradle valuation that he 
never has, never could and never will possess. 

" Mike the Bite's old woman gives birth to a 
small, red-headed, freckled hunk of humanity and 
the limited public that is cognizant of this unimpor- 
tant event murmurs something about the old lady 
running true to form, and immediately loses all in- 
terest in the affair. On the other hand, her imperial 
highness the Grand Duchess of Worms and Taxis 
presents to an anxiously awaiting empire a small, 
marasmus infant about the size and consistency and 
intelligence of a rotten apple, and the entire populace 
sits up on its haunches and howls with glee. It 
doesn't stop to think for a minute that the open- face 
progeny of Mike and his better four-fifths may 
well grow up to a rugged, honest, honourable citizen, 
or even president of the United States, while the 
chances are a million to one against the scion of 
Worms and Taxis ever proving anything but im- 
possible raw material that will defy the best efforts 
of the most expensive collection of human agri- 
culturalists ever gathered together under one can- 
vas ; and that, while the aforesaid son of Mike and 
his wife will grow to be a useful citizen, all that the 



PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLEEN 41 

above-mentioned scion can ever possibly become will 
be a national disgrace and an international menace. 

** So the best it gives Mike's son is a common 
school education, if the schools aren't too crowded, 
while the scion of Worms and Taxis gets both in 
large quantities. Mike the Bite's son, after over- 
coming a million handicaps and leading a useful 
and constructive life, is liable to wind up at last in 
a wooden kimono in Potter's Field; while the 
Wormful and Taxicabbing scion, after having had 
spent on him enough money to pay the national debt 
of China, finally succumbs to wine, women and 
song, though very little song, and at length is mowed 
away in a mausoleum that looks like the power 
station at Cos Cob, Connecticut. 

" Thus goes the world, batting around like a blind 
dog in a butcher's shop, treading on the plants and 
cultivating the weeds, yanking up the June peas 
and carefully cossetting the poison ivy. . . . What 
would you think of a miner that sedulously saved 
the quartz and threw the gold away? Yet that's 
precisely what the world has been doing. It's been 
doing it since the early Silurian Epoch. And I sup- 
pose it'll keep on doing it until Gabriel blows his 
horn, or the millennium comes, or some other little 
thing like that happens to give it a jolt. . . . Bu^ 
it makes one mighty sick, at that." 



42 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

My friend paused. ... I didn't interrupt. At 
length he continued : 

" As the most startling case in point, look," he 
said, "the well known and justly unpopular Kaiser 
William of Hohenzollern. Notwithstanding the 
fact that we have been fighting him for ten months, 
and all other decent people in the world for three 
years and more, how do we still consider him ? As 
a man? Not at all. And yet that is all he is, and 
hardly that. 

" And still even we, who are pleased to consider 
ourselves exponents of democracy in the world, have 
fallen for the same old bunk that monarchs since 
the year one have used to fool and befuddle their 
followers. 

"Trace the pomp and splendour of monarchies 
back to the beginning and you'll find that a monarch 
is the direct descendant of an idol. 

"The great curse of humanity is the lack of 
imagination. To humanity the abstract is like the 
cowslip — just the abstract, nothing more. Hu- 
manity can't visualize a thing unless it sees it. 
Humanity must also have something to worship and 
something to fear. Humanity, like children, can't 
be good for good's sake. It must have a reward to 
inspire, and a punishment to dread. Hence idols; 
idols that would give you a whole flock of wives 



PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 43 

and a good corn crop to feed 'em on, if you behaved 
yourself; and make you certainly hard to find if you 
didn't. 

" But an idol, while highly successful as a stimu- 
lant and a deterrent, proved somewhat unsatis- 
factory when it came to the mundane management 
of human affairs. So, coincidentally with his de- 
velopment, we find arriving on earth the tribal chief. 
The tribal chief was supposed to be the wisest (also 
the toughest) lad in the community. He and the 
idol were supposed to get their heads together and 
dope, things out, and the rest was easy. Further- 
more, they were great little pals, and what they 
didn't whisper into each other's shell-like, or cauli- 
flower, ears, wasn't worth bothering about. 

" It was but a short step from the tribal chief to 
the monarch, a monarch being but a tribal chief 
whose business has grown so that he has had to put 
in a spur track and take on a couple more book- 
keepers in the office. 

*' The early monarch was elected like a president 
in Mexico. He killed all the other candidates and 
then it was plain sailing. When another candidate 
became strong enough to kill him, he resigned, and 
said successful candidate took his place. Being 
king in those days was a short life, but a merry one 
while it lasted. You could help yourself to the best 



44 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

house in the village, and all the wives you wanted, 
and you couldn't possibly get into any trouble (bar- 
ring a Successful Aspirant) because you made up 
the laws out of your own head as you went along. 

** It was about this time that there came into 
vogue that naive sentiment that the king could do no 
wrong. You bet your life he couldn't! He fixed 
that all right before he started. 

"As I have suggested, the monarch business in 
those days was competitive. Divine right was 
effective only until along came another party with 
an even more divine left. But kings were greatly 
honoured while they lasted. They could outdrink, 
outrun, outflirt and outfight any of their subjects, so 
no wonder they were looked up to. And besides it 
wasn't a bit safe to be hypercritical about a party 
who stood six feet six in what should have been his 
socks and who could treat a yearling bull like a pet. 
The surest way to commit suicide in those days was 
to go out on the corner of Main Street and Wash- 
ington Boulevard and make invidious remarks about 
the current monarch. Also as he was the lad from 
whom all worldly blessings flowed, he was not un- 
naturally surrounded by a gang of fawning syco- 
phants. He also commanded the best financial, 
artistic, literary and scientific brains by merely 
sending out a squad of gendarmes to bring 'em in. 



PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLERN 45 

" As time sped by, the same thing happened to the 
monarch business that afterward evolved in this 
country in the oil, steel and butcher businesses. A 
few unusually efficient kings hogged the whole 
works, and formed a trust. Non-union monarchs 
had their chance to sell out or be thrown out. Some 
of them came into the trust and were allowed to re- 
tain their crowns and their cufif links. Others were 
stepped on, as they rightly deserved. And the Mon- 
arch Business was at last put on a sound, financial 
basis, and became as safe as a church. 

" And then what happened? Like many an indi- 
vidual, monarchs were able to stand adversity, but 
not prosperity. As the business began to settle 
down, the monarchs began to settle down with it; 
and they soon became fat and effete. They put 
open plumbing and thermostats into their palaces. 
When they went to bed early Monday morning, full 
of optimism and non-freezing solution, they'd leave 
a call for Thursday afternoon. Themselves waxing 
too fat to fight, they began to employ others to 
do it for them; and it soon got so that the heaviest 
thing a monarch could lift was his sceptre ; and when 
he went out on a brewery horse for a morning's 
canter, it was only a question as to which would first 
crack under the strain. 

" A few of the monarchs at last began to get onto 



46 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

the fact that this would never do. Hitherto, their 
sole claim to their august jobs had been that they 
could lick any other aspirant thereto. Now at last 
finding themselves in a physical condition where 
carrying themselves around constituted a hard day's 
work, they decided that something must be done. 
Since they could no longer keep up the bluff by their 
physical prowess, it must be accomplished some 
other way. But one bluff is as good as the next if 
properly put across. So all they had to do was to 
take up bluff No. 2, hitherto long neglected, but 
lying fallow for their needs. And bluff No. 2 was 
Flumdiddle. 

" They hopped to it blithely. Discarding the 
sheet-iron union suit that for so long had invested 
the monarchial form with the external attributes of 
a Green Mountain base burner, they loaded them- 
selves all up with gold lace and jewels and titles and 
epaulettes and crosses, single and double, to say 
nothing of ribbons, and garters, and swords and 
Prime Ministers' things until just to look at them 
was like seeing the finale of a musical comedy. 

** By keeping themselves in storage warehouses 
with gold roofs, and refusing to let people look at 
them except through smoked glasses, and giving 
themselves large boosts in the newspapers, they 
finally got people to believe that they and Destiny 



PLAIN RILL HOHENZOLLERN 47 

were bosom friends and what they didn't know 
wasn't in the book. And the populace, always 
willing, nay, even anxious, to fool themselves, fell 
for this new bluff just as besottedly as they had for 
the old, and entered right into the game without 
even an intermission. And the monarchs, finding 
out they could bunk 'em a whole lot easier with 
flumdiddle even than they had with prowess, heaved 
a satisfied sigh. . . . 

"You don't believe? . . . How long, do you 
think, would a king last whose name was George 
B. Muggins, and who went around in a Mackinaw 
jacket, and congress gaiters, chewing a straw ? . . . 
The Czar was a very altitudinous little party as 
long as he lived in a union station and had a window 
dresser for a valet. But look what happened to 
him when he came out into the backyard of the 
palace garbed only in a pair of overalls and a snow 
shovel. They couldn't bump him quick enough ! 

" But the monarch business, like all other good 
things, had to come to an end. And the end began 
to come when, of the arrogant security that had been 
theirs, they took it out of the competitive class and 
made it hereditary. A well established business can 
stand darned near anything except heredity. The 
minute you substitute an accident of birth for a 
competent control, that minute marks your arrival 



48 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

at the top of the toboggan slide. And when the 
marasmus scion of Worms and Taxis started in to 
take the place of old Eric the Vermillion, the stuff, 
as the French have it, was off! A barber shop 
couldn't have stood the strain, let alone a mon- 
archy ! 

" No, sir, when the vermin-lined cape of royalty 
fell from the broad shoulders of the gent with the 
reinforced concrete fists and descended automati- 
cally upon the seventeen-inch shoulders, receding 
chin and pear-shaped head of his first born, the end 
w^as in sight. Left to its competitive form, the 
monarch business might have gone on for reons. 
But making it a family graft was too much for it. 
And before long it began to take on that annemic 
appearance of one of those North Carolina families 
that won't marry a perfect stranger like a second 
cousin. 

" So it was that, in 1914 when broke the Great 
War, the monarch business had become practically 
a vanishing industry. France had discarded it. In 
England it had become but a romantic form ; as in 
Belgium, and in Italy. . . . Pressed flowers lying 
between the pages of an old book. . . . 

*' In but one country in the world did this hoary- 
headed old monstrosity toss its mediaeval mane in 
primeval abandon. That was in Germany. There 



PLAIN BILL IIOHENZOLLERN 49 

flourished like the green bay tree all the old hokum, 
all the old buncombe, all the old claptrap, all the old 
flumdiddle. Divine Right, there was, and iron 
crosses, and uniforms that would make a May pole 
look like half mourning. The Kaiser and God were 
fast friends. And above all, the hokum of phrase- 
ology; everything to do with this archaic abortion 
was buried beneath a panoply of words through 
which the light never penetrated. It was his im- 
perial majesty this, and her imperial majesty that; 
and the imperial exchequer, and the imperial coun- 
sellor, and the imperial Prince What Not chewing 
on his imperial teething ring, or getting an imperial 
ache in his imperial tummy. And the imperial 
Kaiser goose stepped his imperial soldiers around to 
please his imperial whim, stopping once in a while 
to imperially give God a few imperial words of con- 
descending compliment on His humble efforts in 
behalf of the imperial empire. 

" In good sooth had Germany become the land of 
the few and the home of the bunk ! 

" Now, peeling off the situation all the tin foil and 
gold bands and iron crosses and whiskers and things, 
and getting out the old stethoscope, what do we 
find to be the real truth about Germany and the 
Kaiser? 

" Germany has a civilization something like that 



50 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

of the Incas, only not so good. On a tenth century 
idea, she has built up a twentieth-century efficiency. 
She has taken from the twentieth-century all that 
its science could give her, and yanked it back with 
her into its tenth-century lair, blood-stained and 
bone filled. And from this rotten hole, she glim- 
mers and glowers and gluts like any Stone Age 
barbarian. 

" For you've got to remember that it's only within 
the last few hundred years that war has been re- 
garded as a terrible thing. Before that war was the 
normal condition of the world, and peace merely the 
vacation that enabled one to recuperate from the 
latest war, and get ready for the next. The view- 
point of humanity was like that of the head-hunter 
who considers that day as utterly wasted that finds 
him not faring forth in quest of a human cranium 
to put on the parlour mantel. 

" Thus, Germany, of her tenth-century civiliza- 
tion, believes and believing, practises. All her writ- 
ings, all her teaciiings, all her efforts, have been going 
on for the last forty years in recuperating from the 
war she then fought, and getting ready for this that 
she is fighting. It was only that we other nations, 
having come to find that peace has its pleasures after 
all, and that killing and rol)bing your fellow men, 
women and children is a low form of amusement, 



PLAIN BILL HOIIENZOLLERN 51 

were too generous to believe that we had within our 
midst so benighted and anachronistic a nation. It 
takes the murder of children peacefully at school to 
make us credit it; and even then it is hard for us to 
believe. Poison gases, and liquid fire, the enslave- 
ment of the conquered, rape, murder, pillage, arson, 
the use of human bodies for fat fertilizer and pigs' 
feed — all these things our stunned intelligence, 
aghast, refuses to credit, even to comprehend. But 
it behooves us to start to commence to begin to get 
ready to understand, and to do it now. Otherwise 
we'll find a practical and personal conviction tliat 
will begin when we spit up our lungs in little pieces 
and end only when we find ourselves hanging in the 
imperial smoke-house and waiting to be fried in neat 
rashers with the imperial eggs for the imperial 
breakfast. 

** And the Kaiser? Stripped of his imperial 
hokum and his august buncombe, he is no more and 
no less than any other roughneck who is capable of 
collecting a gang of vicious or misguided followers 
and terrorizing a community. Monk Eastman, or 
Geronimo, or Captain Kidd, or Bill Hohenzollern, 
it's all the same thing in principle ; in magnitude only 
lies the difference. For where they counted their 
followers by ones. Bill counts his by millions. As 
they planned their raids on individuals, so plans he 



52 T 11 i: V N C 1 V I L W A K 

his raid on nations. As thcv sliot or killed or en- 
slaved their vielinis by tens, so does he shoot or kill 
or enslave his vietinis by thousands and hundreds 
of thousands. Init I'ill and (kM-oninio were the 
only ones to nuirder little ehildren. 

"So, in K)i4, we tind Bill with a piece of lead 
pipe up his sleeve and a i;at in his pocket, peeking in 
the parlour window o\ the Triple l\ntente. where 
Mr. Alphonse France, Mr. J. 1>. luigland and little 
Mr. Albert Relgiuni are talking^ politics, and busi- 
ness, and how late the spring is, and my, what a lot 
of rain we've had this year, while Mrs. bVance, and 
Mrs. luigland and Mrs. Belgium are sitting around 
knitting and telling one another what cute things the 
children have been saying. 

" Behind Bill, in the shadow, one can dindv see 
the bulking form of Bull von Kluck, the well-known 
yegg whose iinger prints are in every police station, 
and Eat 'Km Up jack Hindenberg. the Prussian 
stick-up man. as well as Gentleman Joe Falkenhayn, 
the second story worker. Back of them in the 
gloom, are the hazy figures of the rest of the gang, 
among whom sits Ihihapjiy llapsburg. the Austrian, 
picking at his sideburns and wondering how he hap- 
pened to get there in the tirst place. 

'* ' They ain't lookin', are they, Bill? ' gruflly nuit- 
ters Hindenberg. 



I'KAIN lilJ.J. If O H J:XXOJ>f. KRX .Jo 

" * Nary a peek,' says Bill. * The poor dubs is as 
peaceful and unsuspecting as a lot of kittens under a 
stove.' 

'"Good/ says Von Kluck, rubbing his hands, 

gleefully. 

" ' I choose the little guy,' says Bill's son, young 
Bill, commonly knovv^n as Rat Face, * I can lick him 
too easy! And after we clean up this joint, let's all 
go after that fat guy Uncle Sam, that lives in the 
big house just across the pond. lie ain't looking, 
neither, the poor stiff! And he's richcr'n mud! 
Why, he'd be a pick-up ! ' 

" And then at the word, they knock out the win- 
dow and leap into the room. 

" Little Mr. Belgium puts up a brave fight. But 
he hasn't a chance. In no time they've bounced a 
brick off his head and he's out. 

" But it gives tima for Mr. France to go home and 
get his gun, and for Mr. England to reach his house 
and call to his sons to come to the rescue. But it's 
only by the grace of God and little Mr. Belgium that 
the raid is even resisted. . . . And it's nearly three 
years before Uncle Sam gets his head out from un- 
der the bedclothes and realizes what's going on, and 
begins to try to remember where he put his gun the 
last time he came in with it in 1898. 

" And there you have 'em, thinking, and working, 



54 THEUNCIYILWAR 

and acting precisely like any other gang of bur- 
glars. 

" But of course, way down deep, it's the fault of a 
system; a system of thought, a system of govern- 
ment, a system of civilization; or better, the lack 
thereof. And it is of this rotten and archaic system 
that the Kaiser is a spoiled product. 

" The German Idea is a kiss on the hand of those 
above, and a kick in the face for those beneath. 
The Kaiser, being on top, has had all the kisses. 
From the time he first opened his eyes, and his face, 
on earth, he has had everything his own way. He 
was Little Jack Horner and the world was his pie. 
Every time he made a bum remark all Germany 
sat up and said, ' Ain't he cute ! ' He was taught 
that the country was his, and the people his, and the 
soldiers his. And he could march 'em around, or 
bust 'em in two and throw 'em in the alley as his im- 
perial mood saw imperially fit. 

*' He had two miles of uniforms and was a gen- 
eral or an admiral or something in everything from 
the Imperial Death's Head Hussars to the Imperial 
Boy Scouts. And he nicknamed himself the War 
Lord in much the same spirit, but with deeper re- 
sults, as Booth Tarkington's Penrod might call him- 
self Red Eye, the Trapper. In other words, he was, 
in Germany, what is technically known as the Candy 



PLAIX BILL HOHEXZOLLERN 55 

Kid, or the Fair Haired Child. Is it any wonder 
that on growing up he became a murderous old 
megalomaniac ? Up to the time the war started, his 
record, to paraphrase Mr. Dooley, was that he had 
been a fairly shrewd business man, a successful flirt, 
a ten cents on the dollar failure as a husband, an 
ardent military fan and was about to play off a tie 
in the long-distance mileage championship with ex- 
President Taft. 

" As a further means of groping amid the 
flumdiddle, let's suppose he had been born in Amer- 
ica, of similar condition, station and parent- 
age. 

" His father, William Hohenzollem, St., would 
probably have inherited a large steel business, 
founded by his father, Old George W. Hohen- 
zollem, on the nucleus of a lot of other concerns 
which he iron- or double-crossed and absorbed. 
When young Bill came along, everything was going 
great with the family finances. 

" Early in his youth, he evidenced a strong fond- 
ness for things military; but on joining the boy 
scouts, he got into an unfortunate altercation with a 
hornet's nest with the result that he sort of lost his 
enthusiasm. The fact that he was supposed to take, 
instead of give, orders also militated against his 
complete enjoyment. At which he decided that 



56 THE UNCIYIL WAR 

soldiering was a frost and would have none of 
it. 

" Spoiled as a child by over-indulgent parents, 
Bill was a sort of public pest until it came time to 
send him to college. 

" Once there, he attempted on the strength of his 
father's money and reputation to tell all the other 
lads where to head in at. The other lads stood it 
just exactly one-eighth of one minute. Following 
which, they took him by the jeans and slammed him 
to the disappearing lake recently presented by an- 
other well-known and with himself justly-popular 
steel baron. On emerging from the lake, Bill was 
made to sit in a rose bush, with a toothpick in each 
hand, and sing Pull for the Shore, Sailors, until the 
others got tired of listening. That night he partook 
of his supper from the mantelpiece. 

" He didn't make any of the teams in college be- 
cause he wasn't good enough. He was once caught 
beating a polo pony with a mallet; what happened 
to Bill at the hands of his indignant fellow play- 
ers made the pony's experience seem like a pleas- 
ure. 

" When he graduated from college, his father 
took him into the office. He gave him three dollars 
a week to start. After that, he put him on the road, 
covering the New England States and as far west as 



PLAIN BILL HOHENZOLLEHN 57 

Buffalo. Bill wanted to marry a chorus girl; but 
father sent him to Siberia big game shooting, where 
he soon forgot her. Afterward he came back and 
married the daughter of Jason B. Wiggs, the well- 
known head of the banking firm of Wiggs, Watkins 
& Company, with branch offices in London, Paris, 
Berlin, Vienna, Havana and Buenos Aires. 

*'0n the death of his father, he succeeded to the 
business which, with the aid of a couple of his 
father's old managers, Henry J. Hindenburg and K. 
Percy Falkenhayn, he is managing to keep going, 
although it's a moral certainty that when these two 
beauties die off some of the old line boys will pin 
something on Bill and it won't be a rose. 

'' That is the probable story that would have been 
Bill Hohenzollern's had he been a regular citizen of 
a regular country. There is one other alternative. 
Had his parents persisted in spoiling him, he would 
probably have landed in Matteawan as a dangerous 
paranoiac. 

" As it is, he serves well to illustrate the terrible 
results that must come from the placing in absolute 
power of the mentally, morally and spiritually unfit. 
Lots of things can be withstood by lots of people. 
But not even a whole world can stand heredity. 

''Also," my friend continued, "if Bill's fellows 
had had sense enough to make him sit in a rose bush 



58 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

and sing Pull for the Shore, Sailors, the German 
liners would still be sailing regularly, and some mil- 
lions of men and women and children that are now 
entirely defunct would be sitting down to a happy 
dinner and thinking that life is really a very pleasant 
thing after all. Think it over." 

I have been. ... I still am. . . . 



CHAPTER THREE 



PLEASE FACE RIGHT 1 



CHAPTER THREE 



PLEASE FACE RIGHT! 

«« XT TELL," said my friend, "it's certainly be- 
VV ginning to look like a terrible mess." 

"The war?" I queried. 

He nodded. 

"What with Russia fallen flat on its whiskers; 
with the German forces advancing benevolently to 
protect that prostrate country against itself even if 
it has to kill all the inhabitants to do it; with the 
Bolsheviki holding their sessions on a flat car bound 
east and ratifying peace treaties with Germany 
faster than Germany can dictate 'em; with the whole 
Eastern front disorganized and the war boiling all 
over a surprised hinterland from Riga to Odessa and 
from Dan to Beersheba and from soup to nuts, it 
looks as though Old Man Mars was planning to 
settle down among us for quite a spell. 

" It's funny how all wars seem to be so gaudily 
misjudged. At the start, everybody always says, 
'This war? Oh, my dear sir! It can't last over 
three months at the outside ! ' And when, at the end 

61 



62 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

of three months, it begins to commence to only get 
started, you hear people declare, ' Well, of course I 
was wrong in that estimate. But it can't last a 
year ! It simply can't ! ' And then, at the end of 
the year, you hear 'em say, ' Yes, but you see, we 
didn't know how badly things would break. But it 
can't last two years, that's certain ! ' And so on. 
The false optimism of the human race would be, to 
borrow a word recently and unjustly made popular, 
tragical if it weren't so pathetic; almost as tragical 
as the false pessimism of the gentleman when, asked 
how long he thought the war would last, observed 
that he didn't know; but that he thought the first 
fifteen years were going to be the hardest. 

" The truth of the matter is that the war is going 
to last until we win it. Having said that, it be- 
comes our manifest duty to shut up and go to 
work. 

" One of the main troubles in this country is that 
it has been, during the last twelvemonth, alternately 
the playground of Pollyannas, and Glooms. 

'* To say that everything is going along beauti- 
fully is, manifestly, either a hallucination or a lie. 
Nothing ever went along beautifully with any coun- 
try in any war ever fought. To say that everything 
is hopelessly impossible is equally a hallucination or 
a lie. A lot of things have been badly done. A 



PLEASE FACE It I G H T ! 63 

lot of things have been well done. We have been 
tragically, inexcusably and almost fatally slow in 
the matter of ships. On the other hand, in passing, 
and putting into effect, conscription we have been 
there with bells on! 

**And speaking of conscription leads us at once 
to one of our main and most egregious mistakes and 
one that we are fatuously and supinely persisting in. 
It is the question of Universal Military Training and 
Service. 

" We do not know how long the war is going to 
last. But this we do know : that it is going to last 
a long time and that we are going to need a lot of 
soldiers. And we're going to need them for a long 
time after this war is over. 

'* Nobody argues, of course, against conscription. 
For getting a lot of soldiers in a hurry, conscription 
is the only effective thing. 

" But there is a policy of army-making and na- 
tion-building better and broader and finer, and 
deeper than conscription. And it is Universal Mili- 
tary Service. Conscription puts leaves on the na- 
tional tree. But Universal Military Training 
waters the roots. 

" With conscription you dip your bucket into the 
national stream and hurriedly train a certain number 
of youths to be soldiers. 



64 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

" With Universal Military Training you tap the 
fountain head and let loose a constantly increasing 
stream of soldiery that are carefully and completely 
trained. 

''Which may be mixing metaphors; but is the 
simple truth. 

" It is precisely as though, having no education in 
the country, you had to have a lot of educated men 
in a hurry. The first step, naturally, would be to 
grab all the eligible youths you could and educate 
'em as fast as you could. But the second and more 
important step would be to establish a system of 
schools that would take 'em when they were young 
and educate them slowly and thoroughly to the point 
desired. A man, by cramming, may be able to do a 
lot of work quickly. But he can do it better if he 
has more time, more care, and if he begins at a period 
in life when his mind and body are more malleable 
and additionally receptive. 

** At present we have to fight this war only a lot 
of students whose education has been crammed into 
them in a few short months. 

" How much eflfective, if we could bring to the 
aid of these, additional thousands of youth who had 
been carefully, thoroughly and systematically trained 
to do the work that they must do ! 

" Consider it all carefully. 



P I. E A S E F ACE RIG II T ! 05 



" This nation is at war for an indeterminate in- 
terval. Much as we hate to admit and believe this, 
it is true. There is no end to this war in sight. 
Germany, at present, has all the best of it. She is 
fighting everywhere on enemy terrain. She has, by 
trickery and propaganda, two weapons that ourselves 
and the Allies hardly knew existed, defeated Russia 
and pushed back the formerly victorious armies of 
Italy. She has opened up the storehouses of the 
East; her armies are unbroken and undefeated. 
She will be licked, of course. But she will take a 
lot of licking before that happens. 

" This means that we have got to get into this war 
as soon as we know how, and as hard as we know 
how, and for how long we don't know. But it will 
be a matter not of months, but of years. And 
maybe longer than that. 

" To endure this bitter and indeterminate struggle 
the first thing we must have is soldiers. Naturally 
we want the best soldiers that we can have, and as 
many of them as we can have. 

" And here is where enters the argument between 
conscription and Universal Military Training and 
Service. 

" Which gives the best soldiers ? 

" Universal Military Training. It gives you the 
best soldiers first because it gives you younger sol- 



66 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

diers. Boys in the early twenties make the best 
soldiers. They are physically, mentally and spirit- 
ually more fit. 

'' It gives you the best soldiers because it gives 
you soldiers that are carefully trained over a period 
of months. 

" It gives you the best soldiers because it gives you 
soldiers that have been educated in national spirit 
and national traditions, in uniformity of purpose and 
understanding of ideals. It gives you soldiers in 
whom have been carefully imbedded the spirit and 
aims of national service and obligation. 

" Beyond that it gives you these soldiers at the 
smallest economic loss. Conscription, taking older 
men, men trained in other lines of business, disjoints 
industry and disorganizes business. It disrupts 
families. It causes endless complications in the 
body politic. A man with a wife and three chil- 
dren must be recompensed in one way ; a man with a 
dependent mother and a sick sister must be recom- 
pensed in another; the ramifications are infinite. 
But with Universal Service all that is eliminated at 
the start. A boy of nineteen or twenty is economi- 
cally inconsiderable. He is not married. As a rule 
he has no dependents. As a rule he has no job 
that he is vitally essential to. He likes army life 
better, and takes to it more quickly. He learns 



PLEASE FACE right! 67 

faster. He is better fitted to endure hardship. 
He recuperates more quickly. He can stand 
more. 

" Beyond this, as I have said, it gives us an ever- 
growing strength of 500,000 carefully trained, care- 
fully prepared soldiers every year. In five years, 
2,500,000; in ten years, 5,000,000. . . . In fifteen 
years, 7,500,000 men. . . . Think you that any 
nation on God's green footstool would then attack 
these United States of America? . . . Strength 
is the safety that God has given man to protect him- 
self, whether against the disease that is of war, or 
the disease that is of germs. As a strong body 
throws ofT the germs of disease, so a strong nation 
throws ofif the germs of war. . . . Had England 
and France been strong and ready, there would have 
been no war with Germany. Germany thought 
them weak; so she attacked. . . . And so they 
were. But lay within them latent strength that 
Germany did not see. Hence they battle with the 
horrid disease that has seized them. . . . 

" And it gives you a double benefit. It not only 
protects the country, but it improves the boys them- 
selves. 

" I saw the boys of the first draft of the National 
Army going away to camp, pimply-faced, stoop- 
shouldered, sallow-skinned. I saw them march, 



68 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

only a few months after. You wouldn't have 
known them for the same crowd ! They stood erect. 
They stepped firmly. Their heads were back, their 
chins were in. They belonged to something, and 
something belonged to them; something that when 
they w^ent away, they didn't even know existed. 
When they went away they were just boys. 
But when they came back they were Ameri- 
cans ! 

" They have told me about it, at the camps ; of 
man after man that had lived in holes and hovels, 
and that had never even had a good bath in their 
lives, never known good food, pure air, sunlight, 
exercise. 

" And that is what Universal Military Training 
and Service will do for all our boys. As it makes 
for patriotism, it makes for cleanliness. As it 
makes for spirituality, it makes for health. As it 
makes for education, it makes for happiness. 
Boys of nineteen, malleable for good or for evil, are 
taught the benefits of systematic living; of exercise; 
of the care of their bodies ; of the * early to bed and 
early to rise ' precepts of Franklin. They are 
taught cohesion; communism; the value of con- 
certed efforts. They are taught that they have 
duties to perform as well as privileges to enjoy; 
and that no man has a right to the enjoyment of his 



pleasefaceright! 69 

privileges until he has made them safe by perform- 
ing his duties. . . . And they see the flag floating 
above them; a flag of red, of v^hite, and of blue. 
. . . They are taught that that flag means some- 
thing. . . . They learn that it doesn't fly there 
by accident, or merely because some old party gets 
up early and hauls on a rope. . . . 

" We have in this country a tremendous amount 
of undigested immigration; of men who came to 
this country merely to enjoy the opportunity that 
it offered them to make money. No sense have they 
of their duties. Their idea is merely to get as rich 
as possible as fast as possible by taking advantage 
of conditions made possible for them by the loyalty 
and faith and devotion and glorious honour of the 
Boys of '76, and of '61, of whom these new comers 
never even heard. ... To take these immigrants ; 
to take their growing sons; to put them in line be- 
side our sons, your sons and mine; to make them 
feel that they belonged to something ; that the coun- 
try was their country, to love, to live for, to fight 
for, to die for; that the flag of red, of white, of 
blue, was their flag, too ! . . . If this were all that 
Universal Military Training and Service could ac- 
complish then ought we to get down on our knees 
and pray to God. 

"All these things argue for Universal Military 



70 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

Training and Service. And what arguments have 
there been adduced against it ? 

" Since we entered the war, I have heard but 
one : that it is to be hoped that after this war there 
won't be any more wars and that therefore we won't 
need it! 

" There's a convincing one for you ! Aside from 
the fact that it talks about what is going to happen 
after this war when as far as we are concerned 
this war hasn't started yet, and aside from the fact 
that nobody can possibly know what's going to hap- 
pen after this war; and aside from the fact that 
wars have been going on on this earth for five 
thousand years without a break, it is great reason- 
ing. 

" It wants to base our national policy on a hope. 

" It forgets that from 19 14 until 19 17 we based 
our national policy on a hope. We hoped we 
wouldn't get into this war. But we did. We got 
in entirely unready and entirely unprepared; so 
unready and so unprepared that after being in it a 
year, we are still practically powerless. Only the 
armies of France and the navy of England have 
saved us from the horrors of Belgium. And that's 
what basing a national policy on a hope does for a 
country ! 

'' No, sir. If we're going to take our part in put- 



PLEASE FACE RIGHt! 71 



ting down this foray on civilization of the new Attila 
and his modern Huns, we've got to organize as a na- 
tion, equip as a nation, and act as a nation. 

"And the first step toward being a nation, in 
thought as in act, in deed as in spirit, is Universal 
Military Training and Service." 



CHAPTER FOUR 



THE ALCOHOLOCAUST 



CHAPTER FOUR 

THE ALCOHOLOCAUST 

MY friend laid down his magazine, thought- 
fully. 
''What is it?" I queried. 

"A booze article," he returned. 

He sat for a moment, in silence. I did not in- 
terrupt. 

"I wish," he said, at length, ''that sometime an 
article about alcohol, instead of being written by a 
pro person, or a con person, could be turned out by 
a thoroughly impartial neutral. It would be a lot 
more convincing. 

" As it is," he continued, " they're written com- 
monly either by a press agent for a distillery, or by 
some gentleman who has gone to the mat with the 
Demon and been thrown for the count, and then 
some. Whereat they're either replete of fulsome 
flattery, telling you that alcohol is a blessing to 
humanity, a food, an exercise, a cure for anything 
from ingrowing hair to fallen arches, and a gentle- 
manly form of indoor sport; or else it's an unmiti- 
gated, unadulterated, dyed-in-the-wool curse and 

75 



76 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

not even fit to burn in a chafing dish. They seem 
too enthusiastic to remember that there are several 
kinds of alcohol, and several kinds of uses, and 
abuses, for the same. To their minds, alcohol is 
alcohol ; and that's all there is to it. 

" I hold no brief, mind you, for alcohol. Booze, 
as booze, is a delusion and a snare. There's no 
argument in the world about that. It's the concen- 
trated quintessence of poison; and does just as little 
good in the world as infantile paralysis, or hook 
worms, and infinitely more harm. Only booze 
doesn't cover the whole alcoholic question any more 
than hydrophobia covers the question of dogs. 
There are a lot of other angles; which so far, I have 
never seen touched. And they should be. That's 
all." 

" How do you regard it ? " I queried. 

" In considering a question like alcohol," he re- 
turned, " it's a great idea to get back to first prin- 
ciples. And to do this, we must first, of necessity, 
divide alcohol — that is, drinkable alcohol — into two 
classes: the first class comprizing those forms of 
alcoholic liquor whereof the percentage of alcohol is 
so low as to be almost negligible, such as fight wines 
and beer; and the second class taking in the high 
percentage drinks, like rum, gin, whiskey, brandy, 
and the jumbled admixtures thereof, such as cock- 



THEALCOHOLOCAUST 77 

tails, sours, fizzes, rickeys, pousse cafes, and so 
forth. 

"In the course of a long and multifarious ac- 
quaintance with alcohol in all its forms, I cannot re- 
call where I have seen any great harm done by beer 
and light wines. To be sure, an overplus of the 
former will often make a man bloated as to appear- 
ance and cause his kidneys to drop their moorings 
and gaily sail away, while continual internal bathings 
in the latter might cause an insurance examiner, 
carefully inspecting the applicant's moods and tenses, 
to wag his head and exclaim, sadly, * Alas, poor 
Uric ! ' — which is no more than could be accom- 
plished by a steady diet of chocolate caramels, or nut 
sundaes. And I have been in places where the water 
was so much worse (and incidentally so much more 
expensive) than the wine, that only a fanatic, or a 
Rockefeller, would hesitate in choosing between 
them. All of which brings us around gracefully to 
the conclusion that beer and light wines are a nega- 
tive form of vice, like blood-rare roastbeef, choco- 
late eclairs and red pepper, any of which, if indulged 
in to excess, will do strange things to your works 
and make you wish you hadn't. 

" And in corroboration of this, I have one friend 
who has totally ruined his digestion and his nervous 
system by becoming an ice-cream soda dipsomaniac. 



78 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

and another who has cremated the Hning of his stom- 
ach by putting paprika on almost everything he eats. 
'* On the other hand, if you should ask me what 
good is accomplished by beer and light wines, I 
should answer you just as cheerfully, ' Not any.' 
They are like tea and coffee. Anybody and every- 
body would be better off without them. The system 
doesn't need them, and shouldn't have them. And 
they can be defended only on the grounds on which 
we can defend tea and coffee : that they don't do any 
great amount of harm; that people are used to hav- 
ing them; and that to invade the personal liberties 
of private individuals in virtually innocuous matters 
causes widespread discontent and confusion and ac- 
complishes more harm than it does good. If five 
thousand men are used to having a can of beer a day, 
to take away that can of beer upsets five thousand 
minds a lot and benefits five thousand stomachs but 
a little. Life, after all, is not a question of abso- 
lute perfection on the one hand, and absolute imper- 
fection on the other. Life is not a question of 
perfection at all. It's a question of approximation 
— of batting averages. And a public move that 
reaps a ten percent benefit, and accomplishes a 
twenty percent injury is not a reform at all, but a 
retrogression. 

" But I want to add this, and add it in a hurry. 



THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 70 

All men, women and children in the world should 
be weaned away from beer and light wines as 
quickly and as thoroughly as possible. But they 
should be weaned, and not ravished. Make beer 
and light wines more expensive and harder to get. 
And offer no substitutes. To cure a man of one 
vice by offering him another, is as foolish as it is 
destructive. When you are doing wrong, there is 
only one course to pursue. Stop doing wrong, and 
begin to do right. A procedure of palliation does 
not correct; it only confuses. 

*' It is on the question of beer and light wines that 
so many well-meaning but unbalanced people have 
gone wrong to the general injury of a worthy and a 
vital cause. My earliest recollections are of a lot of 
long-haired men and short-haired women raving 
their heads off, as to how the pouring into his anat- 
omy of one glass of the red ink that is served with 
an Italian table d'hote would damn a man's soul to 
everlasting hellfire and perdition. These were the 
same people who considered a friendly game of 
progressive euchre a sufficient cause for excom- 
munication from the church; and who deemed that 
if, on Sunday, a person didn't go to church at least 
three times, read any book but the Bible, took a stroll 
to any place except the cemetery, and let his face 
assume any other position except that of an inverted 



80 T II E U N C I V I L ^V A K 

Y, that person was doing a nose-dive straight for 
the nethermost depths of hell, and great would be 
the joy of the there assembled Satanic stokers at his 
arrival. 

" And there's another funny thing. The picture 
of a house-warming in hell always struck me as 
singularly unconvincing from any Christian view- 
point. 

'' These well-meaning but misguided souls were, 
and always have been, to the cause of Temperance 
precisely what the White House pickets are to the 
cause of suffrage — the lunatic fringe that brings 
into disrepute the clean, fine cloth that it edges. 
And they do a tremendous harm ; for after one peek 
at them, a person is ready to line up with the other 
side no matter what it is. 

" A man might have no idea in the world of 
taking a drink. But on getting one flash at a col- 
lection of the strange human fungi above-alluded to, 
he would be very liable to say to himself, ' If that 
outfit means Prohibition, me for rum ! ' Just as, 
after standing around watching a lady with a dis- 
couraged pompadour and a vintage skirt trying to 
pour glue into a mail box, any ordinary citizen 
who likes to be able to distinguish his monthly bills 
from a collection of second-hand fly-paper would be 
more than liable to say to himself, * If that's suf- 



THE AI.COHOLOCAUST 81 

f rage, count me among the antis ! ' It isn't that suf- 
frage is wrong. It's that a few pin-headed ex- 
ponents thereof are doing their best to make it ap- 
pear so. And I venture to say that not a few 
perfectly innocent gentlemen have been driven into 
saloons to get away from the gas attacks of the very 
ones who were trying to keep them out. 

"The trouble is that from time beyond record, 
the Prohibitionists have overshot the mark. Good- 
ness knows, there are enough damning truths 
against alcohol that one can tell without resorting to 
lies. Alcohol is guilty of plenty of crimes without 
racking one's imagination to find new ones to blame 
it for. But no! That didn't satisfy them. And 
they used to tell stories about Champagne Charlie 
who drank a glass of claret lemonade at a whist 
party, and came staggering home a confirmed drunk- 
ard and hext morning robbed a bank and mur- 
dered the watchman and died on the gallows 
murmuring, ' Let all young men take a lesson from 
me, and never look upon the wine when it is red 
for it stingeth like a serpent and biteth like an adder.' 
They also used to send out lecturers, with coloured 
charts, showing the terrible effects of alcohol on the 
human stomach (which they invariably pronounced 
*stummick'). Most of these charts were very 
pretty in colour, though crude as to composition. 



82 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

And the lecturers carried with them Horrible Ex- 
amples in the shape of human derelicts; and it took 
all the profits to buy enough gin to keep the example 
sufficiently horrible. Oftentimes the lecturer was 
even more horrible than the example. Which com- 
plicated matters to the lecturee. 

" Now if these people had spent their time, their 
money and their effort in slamming at the real issue, 
which is the high percentage drinks, like gin, 
whiskey, brandy, rum and the so-called mixed 
drinks — all those manifold straight and concocted 
beverages that come under the generic head of 
booze — , an infinite amount of confusion might have 
been saved and an infinite amount of good accom- 
plished. For in these high percentage drinks, you 
face an entirely different proposition. And again, 
in order to get a good viewpoint from which to look 
them over, you must again go back to first principles 
and ask yourself two questions: 

" What is booze ? 

'* Why do people drink it ? 

" The answers are easy. 

" Booze is nothing more, and nothing less than a 
form of drug. 

" People drink booze because they want to be 
drugged. 

" For booze there is no mor^ extenuation, or ex- 



THEALCOHOLOCAUST 83 

cuse, or reason, or apology than there is for cocaine, 
or morphine, or opium, or any other form of drug. 
It is a vice, pure and simple ; that it is a modified vice 
makes it but the more insidious; that it is an open 
vice makes it but more dangerous. And that, in 
many instances, it leads to the deeper and rottener 
forms of vice, is indisputable. 

" Only this, in justice and in encouragement, must 
be said : that it is easier to break with booze than 
with the stronger drugs. 

" As for the people that drink it : there are as 
many forms of drinkers as there are of drinks, and 
more. 

"First, there is the common, or garden drinker, 
who drinks just because he likes to get drunk. He 
is commonly sodden, sordid and uninteresting, and 
never gets sober if he can help it. 

" Second, there is the sociable drinker. He brags 
that he never thinks about taking a drink when he's 
by himself. But he loves to lean his wish-bone up 
against a rail and bask in the false sunlight of alco- 
holic camaraderie ; a camaraderie that is as false as 
the drug that engenders it. Properly pickled, he 
loves everybody and everybody loves him and every- 
thing ish wunnerful until the morning after. Then 
it isn't. 

" Third, the lone drinker. He drinks because the 



84 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

load of life and life's responsibilities is too heavy for 
him to bear without alcoholic aid. He is obsessed 
of work, or of care. He drinks because he feels 
bad. And he feels bad because he drinks. 
Whereat he is what is technically known as whip- 
sawed. He's done before he begins and he hasn't 
got a chance in the world to win. 

" Fourth, the playful drinker. He drinks be- 
cause he finds that it makes him the life of the party. 
Ordinarily, dull and retrusive, he finds that three 
or four hookers will enable his conversation to 
scintillate and his repartee to scorch. He is spurred 
on by the admiring laughter of the gathering, and if 
he doesn't overdo it, he gleams beautifully as long as 
his light stays lit. But when his wick burns out, 
he's all done, and graduates into either class i or 
class 2. 

"Fifth, the youthful drinker. He drinks because 
he thinks it's smart. He breaks his mother's heart, 
and makes his father say bitter things beneath his 
breath. . . . He is easily led into folly, crime, 
ruin or disease or all the rotten quartette. . . . 
If he escapes, it is only because God is very good to 
him indeed. . . . 

" Sixth, the imaginative drinker. He drinks to 
get more out of life than there is in it. He could 
save time by taking hashish. 



THEALCOHOLOCAUST 85 

"Seventh, the sensuous drinker. He loves to 
play with his stomach, with his brain, with his eyes, 
with his ears. He finds that cocktails and highballs 
give added zest to his appetite; that cordials warm 
his stomach. He finds that a few drinks make en- 
tertaining ordinarily stupid ; that colours take added 
glow, music an added melody, when assimilated 
through a gas mask of alcohol. He is never 
normal, never himself. Life he views through a 
purple haze. The good resolutions that he makes at 
night, die still born in the cold grey gloom of the 
morning after. He comes in at three p. m., mur- 
murs a subdued ' good morning,' and leaves it to 
the bartender to do the best he can. 

"Eighth, the idle rich drinker. He has been 
everywhere, done everything, seen everything. He 
drinks because alcohol gives him a new sensation. 
At the finish it usually enables him to see something 
new. He sees it alone. And it isn't in any zoo- 
logical work ever compiled. 

" Female drinkers can be herded with the males 
into most of these categories. But, as women can 
rise to greater heights in life than men, so can 
they sink to greater depths. ... A drunken 
man is sodden. A drunken woman is sicken- 
ing. 

" As for the so-called Moderate Drinker, there is 



86 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

no question in my mind that he does exist ; in negli- 
gible quantities, it is true; for he is the alcoholic 
rara avis. But he is there, nevertheless. I myself 
have known several of him. But the trouble with 
him is that he writes no articles for magazines. 
Said articles for the main part are contributed by 
human submarines who have been so busy plumbing 
the poisoned depths that they haven't had time to 
notice the few and insignificant skip- jacks on the 
surface. 

**This, mind you, is no defence even for the 
moderate drinker, who deserves no credit for his 
moderation. He is blessed usually with a congenital 
indifiference to alcohol ; he drinks only because some- 
body asks him to, and it's too much trouble to say 
no. Whereat he pollutes his insides slightly with 
a small amount of liquid poison that he would be 
much better without, and achieves neither joy nor 
sorrow thereat. Occasionally, you find a moderate 
drinker of another description : the person of pro- 
found and ironbound habit, who lives by rote. 
Two of these I have known : and I knew them best 
when they were eighty or past. It was their never- 
failing custom, at the fall of day, to partake of a 
glass — one glass, no more, — of hot water, lemon 
juice, sugar, with a modicum of rye whiskey. 
One glass, no more, they took ; and they spoiled the 



THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 87 

better part of an hour in so doing. I never could 
conceive that it did anything to shorten their 
days, or drive them into a drunkard's grave. 
On the other hand, I used to wonder if they 
wouldn't enjoy it just as much if they had used 
Jamaica ginger, or something, in place of the 
whiskey. 

" I can conceive, too (although I have seen it 
vehemently denied) that alcohol possesses its 
medicinal values. A life saving crew, shivering and 
shaking in the clammy cold of a winter's night — a 
raiding party in the mud and muck and slush of the 
January trenches — can be warmed up and reinvigo- 
rated by a proper dose of alcohol medicinally ap- 
plied. Of course piping hot tea, scalding footbaths, 
plenty of warm blankets and hot-water bottles might 
do the same thing. But until life boats and trench 
parties can be equipped with tea cosies, footbaths, 
blankets and hot-water bottles, it would seem to me 
that the simpler and equally efficacious remedy 
should be adhered to. But it should be remembered 
that here alcohol is used as a medicine. To sell 
alcohol over a bar as a beverage is just as sensible as 
to open a small stand for the vending of strychnine 
pills as a candy. 

"To me booze, as a beverage and as an amuse- 
ment stands naked, shameless and without excuse. 



88 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

I have heard many pleas for booze so handled, many 
excuses, many arguments. But never yet have I 
heard a good one. 

** I have heard many arguments in favour of 
saloons ; but never yet a good one. Liquor dealers, 
most of whom by the way, are teetotalers, are fond 
of upholding the saloon as the poor man's club. If 
the poor man must have a club in which he can 
drink up all the money that ought go to feeding and 
clothing his wife and children, or spend in buying 
new limousines for the saloon keeper the money 
with which he should be purchasing a Liberty Bond 
or which he should be putting aside for a spell 
of inclement weather, he's better ofif without any 
club. 

** If a man can't have a club from which he can 
walk home like a gentleman at a decent hour, instead 
of staggering in at 2 g. m. with an Alice blue liver, 
he'd better give up the nonchalant life of the man- 
about-town and settle down to something that 
doesn't include vertigo, physical prostration and 
wife-beating. Which is what the saloon does, and 
you can't get away from it. 

'* For the saloon, there is absolutely no excuse, 
argument or palliation. Honest saloon keepers 
themselves will tell you so. It is legalized vice and 
open temptation. It ruins and wrecks more men 



THE ALCOIIOLOCAUST 89 

than any other influence in the known world. It is 
absolutely and utterly rotten. Every saloon in the 
world should be closed to-day, and never again 
opened. If no more than 200,000 men spend an 
average of half an hour a day in saloons, there alone 
are roo,ooo hours a day wasted to the individual and 
to the world — 100,000 hours which means about 
4,000 days, or between 10 and ri years that could 
be devoted to something decent, useful, helpful, 
healthful. Consider that economic waste alone. 
And then add to that the active harm to livers and 
stomachs and morals that goes with it. No, sir, any 
man that can discover any excuse whatever for a 
saloon would make Christopher Columbus look like 
a hermit ! 

'*I have seen a thousand rotten things done by 
booze — and not one good one. 

*' I could talk for hours of the crimes of booze 
that I have seen, and known. Good men turned 
into living corpses ; happy marriages wrecked ; busi- 
ness failures made; dollars and lives and love and 
self respect and manhood and womanhood and vir- 
tue and honour and character all washed away in 
this rotten, putrid stream that man has made to 
poison his own kind. 

" One friend I had, and one I loved. He drank 
at first because he found that, when drinking, he 



90 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

always had a good time. Later he found that 
drinking sustained him for his work and his fun. 
It coloured his pleasure, and concealed his 
cares. ... At thirty-five Booze got him. . . . 
And now he is a distorted, human grotesque — a liv- 
ing dead man. 

"Another friend I have. At one time he was 
rich, loved, useful. He worked too hard. He 
could not sleep. He found that Booze quieted him ; 
that drinking, he could attain a condition that, while 
not sleep, was at least surcease. ... It marked 
the beginning of the end. . . . His money, his 
friends, all have gone. . . . Not even health has 
he left. . . . 

" I have two other friends. At night their good 
resolutions are wonderful. But when morning 
comes they are heavy, dull, despondent. They wait 
for noon, and strength. So do they never see the 
mornings of their lives. Without drink they would 
be men. . . . But the drink is there. . . . And 
the years are fast passing. 

"I can see no argument in favour of booze. I 
can see it only as a crime against humanity. . . . 
And a crime that should be stopped completely. It 
should be stopped now, and for all time. There 
should be no more treating with John Barleycorn 
than with the German Kaiser. He is faithless, 



THEALCOHOLOCAU8T 91 

treacherous, lying, cruel, and absolutely untrust- 
worthy in all his dealings, 

" But the main thing of all that I want to pin on 
old John Barleycorn is the fact that while he is a 
tough guy at heart, and the King of Confidence 
Men, in the early stages of one's acquaintance, he 
looks like a gentleman. He wears a dress suit, and 
a diamond pin, and has money in all his pockets; 
and he's full of good stories, and bonhomie and 
camaraderie and esprit and savoir faire and as he 
slaps you on the back with one hand, and pours a 
drink down your neck with the other, you think to 
yourself, ' My goodness, here's the nicest fellow I've 
met yet ! ' 

" And you and John (you're probably calling him 
Jack by this time) go trailing around together, and 
having the time of your lives. . . . And every 
one of his stories is better than the last! . . . And 
the drinks he hands you don't taste very good, but 
they make you feel great ! . . . And he knows so 
many good fellows ! Every place you go — clubs, 
saloons, restaurants — and as I've murmured before, 
you love everybody, and everybody loves you, and 
ain't life wunnerful and my! what a beautiful shun- 
shet! What two beautiful shunshets! 

*' Yes, he's a wonderful companion, and stays that 
way until there comes a day when he wants you to 



92 TIIEUNCIVILWAR 

do something that you feel you shouldn't. . . . 
Then he begins to get nasty. . . . 

'' This is the crucial time. Unless you've courage 
and strength to leave him flat and go your own way, 
leaving him to go his, things begin to happen. . . . 
And much to your surprise, you find that where 
formerly it was friend and friend, now it has be- 
come master and man. . . . He is your owner, 
you his slave. . . . He has sapped your 
will. . . . You have to go to him to decide things 
for you; to help you through the day. . . . And 
invariably he decides for evil. . . . His counsel is 
always toward harm. 

** And then you learn him for what he is — a 
cankered soul, rotten to the core, lying, deceitful, 
treacherous, evil-minded, vile. . . . He is without 
respect for women; without ethics toward man; 
specious, sophistric, sullen. . . . More than likely, 
by this time, he's got you right where he wants 
you. And if, by this time, you aren't diseased of 
body and of mind, it isn't his fault, but God's 
mercy. . . . 

" And the toughest part of it all is, that when 
you, who have known him, and joined in his parties, 
try to tell his new victims what he really is, they 
distrust you, they disbelieve you. They think 
you're an old crab; and a sorehead who, because he 



THE ALCO HOLOCAUST 93 

can't stand the pace any longer, is trying to put the 
kibosh on the whole show. 

" You come into a club and see John, sitting in a 
corner scintillating before a lot of his new friends. 
They're having a great time and thinking my ! ain't 
he the cutest lad you ever met? 

" ' Sit down,' invites the Latest Victim, * and meet 
my old friend, Mr. Barleycorn.' 

*' ' No, thanks,' you say, * I know him already.' 

"'You do!' exclaims another of the group, in 
surprise. ' Why I didn't know that ! ' 

" * Yes,' you return, ' he did me out of a good 
business, a wife and three children, and most of my 
digestion. I don't believe I care to associate with 
him any more.' 

" * What ! ' exclaims the Latest Victim, incredu- 
lously. * You don't mean to accuse my good friend 
Barleycorn of doing all that!' 

" * I do,' you return, * absolutely.' 

" The Latest Victim sniffs scornfully. 

'* ' Then it must have been your own fault,' re- 
turns the Latest Victim. ' I've known him a couple 
of weeks, and he's the greatest little playmate I've 
hit since I left the Old Farm.' 

" * Oh, let that poor grouch go home,* says an- 
other Victim, eyeing you with alcoholic disfavour. 
' He'sh got to put out the cat and wind the clock 



94 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

and he'sh late already.' And he picks up a glass and 
begins to sing something about it always being fair 
weather when goo' fellersh getsh toghezzer. 
While you sigh, and murmur to yourself, * What's 
the use ? ' and go your weary way. 

" I suppose the trouble is that to Youth, Age will 
always be dull, stupid and old fogyish. The fact 
that Age was Youth once himself and, as Youth was 
just as willing to and just as capable of, making an 
1 8 karat darned fool of himself as Youth now is, 
seems to escape Youth completely, as does also the 
fact, that in a few fleeting years. Youth himself will 
be Age, in turn. 

" But all my life I've wanted to tell Youth a 
few things. I don't expect many of them to listen, 
or to believe. But if even one does, then will 
the time and efifort be well spent, and I shall be 
glad. . . . 

" I've wanted to tell girls, * Don't drink.' Clean 
men don't like it. It makes dirty men think dirty 
things of you. It coarsens your looks. It makes 
wrinkles in your face. It makes your figures fat 
and gross. It cheapens you in every way, physi- 
cally, mentally, morally. And it's dangerous. It's 
a delicate thing to gauge. Some night you may get 
a little too much. And then, if you happen to fall 
into the hands of a rotten man, — a crystal vase 



THEALCOHOLOCAUST 95 

can be so broken in a minute, that not all the aeons 
can serve to mend it. . . . 

" I've wanted to tell boys, not to drink. It isn't 
that I'm an old prude. I know what I'm talking 
about. Booze stimulates the body for evil; and 
with body stimulated, the will weakens, the mind 
grows flaccid. It leads to nasty thoughts. And in 
nastiness of thought, lies nastiness of action. And 
in nastiness of action lie sickness, and the horrid, 
rotting diseases of flesh and brain that make a man 
wish to God he had died instead! And before you 
lie only years of shame, and torture and horror — 
the contempt of all decent people- — and when you 
want to grow up to be a clean man, and maybe have 
boys of your own, you cannot, because those boys 
will be as rotten, as diseased, as you are. . . . 
College coaches teach you to cut out alcohol, to live 
cleanly, and regularly. Why? It isn't to please 
them, is it? It's because you can do better work; 
it's because it makes you stronger, healthier, more 
vigourous. 

** For, after all, your body is merely the machine 
in which you, as an individual, ride around. You 
wouldn't think of throwing sand in the gears of 
your automobile, would you? Then why throw 
alcohol into the gears of your body ? Don't you care 
as much for your body as you do for your auto- 



96 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

mobile? Then why take such good care of your 
automobile, and such poor care of your body? But 
bodies don't cost anything, you say? True. But 
you can buy a new automobile when the old one 
wears out. But you can never get but one 
body. . . . Take care of it when it's young. Or 
you'll be mighty sorry, when it begins to get old. 

" And I've wanted to tell parents : * Don't bring 
up your children in ignorance.' If you don't think 
they've got sense enough ever to understand any- 
thing, then hire a keeper for them. But if you do 
turn them loose on life, at least point out the pit- 
falls. Would you send a child out to play in a 
meadow full of hidden wells? Then why send a 
child out to play in the fields of life that are full 
of poisoned traps a thousand times worse than 
death ? 

" I knew the mother of two of the most beautiful 
girls I've ever seen. Before taking them out to 
dinner, she would split a pint of champagne be- 
tween the two, to make their eyes bright, their con- 
versation sparkling. Whose fault if these two girls 
go straight to hell and stay there? A mother like 
that isn't fit to have children. That God should 
ever have given them to her is beyond human under- 
standing. Nor is the husband of that mother fit to 
have children. They haven't even the sense of ani- 



THEALCOHOLOCAUST 97 

mals; they are a form of human swine beyond the 
contempt of decent people. 

" When God gives you the joy of having children, 
He gives you also the responsibility of their care. 
See to it that you fulfil that responsibility; nor by 
laziness, selfishness and ignorance let them reap the 
fatal consequences of your own neglect. 

*' Booze is an open cesspool on the highway of 
life. It should be filled in, graded off, and for- 
gotten. And it should be done now." 



CHAPTER FIVE 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 



CHAPTER FIVE 

EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 

" T UST what do you think," I asked my friend, 

%J **of the Thrift Campaign that the gov- 
ernment has started ? " 

He turned. 

"What do I think?" he repeated. "What can 
anybody with sense enough to wind a watch think of 
a movement Hke that except that it is probably the 
greatest national factor for good that has hit this 
country since the day when Columbus shinned up 
the front smokestack and said, ' Boys, ii looks like 
Brooklyn ! ' 

" As an idea it's a pippin. As a conception, it's a 
bird. And as practical development for a country 
that has loved to remain both impractical and unde- 
veloped, it's a whale. 

"Here we've been going on for at least all the 
years that I can remember with but one idea in our 
heads. Which was to see how much more money 
we could make than the next lad, and how much 
faster we could spend it. Speeding forward from 

JOl 



1Q2 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

the days when a high-wheeled bicycle and a tennis 
blazer meant untold affluence, we had come to a 
point where, if a man didn't have an automobile, a 
first and second mortgage and a bad attack of indi- 
gestion, he was regarded as a comparative pauper, 
not to say a social outcast. 

" Far behind in the dim and hazy past had been 
left the good old axioms like * Take care of the 
pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.' 
No such antique and outworn ideas as that for us ! 
We had a new motto. ' Take care of the millions 
and leave the chicken feed for the pikers.' And 
we lived up to it, too, by golly! Not that we all 
took care of the millions. Far be it from such. 
But we were at least consistent in our attitude to- 
ward the chicken feed. No man kept any of that 
unless perchance he were bed-ridden, and had lost 
his fountain pen and his check-book. And in this 
case, his family came nobly to his assistance. 

'* It was not so in the old days. This country was 
neither founded nor upbuilt on the basis that money 
was some sort of a sociological set piece that, the 
moment it came, should be stuck up in the backyard 
and set fire to. It has remained for the plethora of 
riches that came of later years to afflict us with that 
impression; just as, if a man has one bullet and one 
charge of powder and he needs those to kill his 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 103 



breakfast with, he doesn't indulge himself in any 
vainglorious celebrations therewith. 

" It's only when he gets so much powder that he 
doesn't know what to do with it that he takes to 
shooting a lot just to hear the noise. 

** Up to fifty years ago, this country was not so 
affluent of rose nobles and louis d'ors that it could 
take to throwing 'em into the lake just to see how 
big a splash they'd make. Money came too hard, 
and too infrequently for that. Every dollar had a 
suction on it like an octopus. And pennies would 
burrow down into the sand in a way to make a 
cohaug clam think he was a skylark. 

" Father'd start out before breakfast in the morn- 
ing with an 1836 overcoat and an 1823 hat, a pair 
of vintage rubbers and an umbrella that was by 
rights a museum specimen. And if he came back 
home not more than two hours late for supper with 
a total accumulation of a dollar and eighty-three 
cents and three water blisters, he'd think he had a 
good day. And mother wouldn't even feed him un- 
til she'd tucked the dollar eighty-three sacrosanctly 
away in the little old cracked sugar bowl along with 
the nine seventy-one already there that was being 
saved up for a rainy day; and goodness knows in- 
clement intervals were seldom far apart. 

*' Dollars in those days had the homing instinct. 



104 T H E U N C I V I L W A R 

They cuddled up together like day-old chicks. And 
the more there were, the closer they cuddled. 

" Not that they couldn't be coaxed out if the need 
arose. They could. And willingly. There was 
always a dime for the Sunday morning beans. 
There were always a couple of dollars ready for a 
warm coat, or to take dancing lessons, and when 
Adelbert and Ernest and Hector J. got old enough 
to go to Dartmouth or Paducah, there were dollars 
ready to escort them there in comfort, if not with 
the auriferous magnificence of a circus parade. 

"And when dad and mother got old they could 
always go to the sugar bowl and find the taxes and 
the rent, and enough to pay the grocery and meat 
bills, and to settle with the family doctor against 
lumbago, and things, and a little to help the young 
folks along with if they came to a bare spot. 

'' And that was because in those days people were 
Builders. They were constructive. Starting with 
a firm foundation, they created the edifices of their 
lives, firmly, splendidly. And they modelled those 
life-creations upon the pyramids, solid, and square 
and permanent of base, and tapering with the years 
into the graceful, sky-reaching tips of their apexes. 
Big and full and strong were their lives in the be- 
ginning. Gentler and finer and softer toward the 
end. . . . And that, whether it be a life, or a pyra- 



i: X T K A V A C] A N C E V S . K C O N O M Y 105 

mid, is the way to construct. If you don't believe 
it Well, did you ever try to push over a pyra- 
mid? . . . 

" In those days, too, people taught their children 
to build similarly. Which is another factor that has 
been tremendously overlooked of later years. * As 
the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined ' is a good old 
saying, as true now as when it was first spoken. 
Also, 'The child is father of the man.' 

"And in those days twigs were Ijent carefully to- 
ward the direction in which they should grow; 
children were reared conscientiously that they might 
be good fathers to their parents. 

" They were not given eight thousand dollar 
runabouts as toys ; nor a forty dollar a week saloon 
allowance. A nickel, or a dime, every Saturday 
morning — to be at once carefully interned in a bank 
that looked like the capitol at Washington and was 
twice as hard to get anything out of; and for the 
rest, an occasional hard won penny for a lollypop; 
an occasional dollar achieved by mending, sewing, 
making beds, chopping wood or running errands. 
Which taught children that dollars didn't grow on 
fathers like Brussels sprouts on their respective 
stalks, but were the product of industry, labour, 
brains and effort. 

" Children were then, as they should be, taught 



ll)() r H K I' N CM V I L W AK 

the proper respect, iiiulerstaiulini;- aiul valuation of 
money, aiul that it was hard to get. hard to keep, 
easy to spend, good to i\aye. potent iov harm, essen- 
tial tor good, and that, wisely handled, it made tor 
health, wealth and happiness. 

" But gradually, of the added yohime of wealth, 
and of the added ease of muniticence, came the 
change. And what a difference! 

" Take a peek at father leaving the house to- 
day ! He wears an up-to-minute coat, with that 
daring tiare ahout the collar that designates the 
buccaneer spirit of the real tkuieur. a nifty pair of 
trousers done with all the delicate esprit of the at 
once artistic and vagroni spirit that marks the sar- 
torial knight errant, and a pair of spats that are of 
exactly as much use to him, and no more, than would 
be a second pair of cuff's, or two neckties. 

*' Thus festooned, he teeters across the richly em- 
bossed sidewalk and crawls lugubriously into an 
automobile that looks like a cross between Napo- 
leon's coach and a British tank. And promptly at 
three g. m. he gets as far back toward home as the 
club, with an intlammable breath and a hundred and 
eighty thousand dollars which is almost enough to 
pay the interest on the six million he borrowed to 
make the hundred and eighty thousand with. And 
mother later meets his blurred but still degage form 



K X 'J It A V A r; A N C K vs. K C f> N O M Y 1 07 

at the front door to shake him down for another 
sixty thousand that he doesn't know whether he's 
got or not, and couldn't find out without the aid of 
a coufjJe of receivers and a bankruptcy court, so that 
she can buy herself a set of silver fox furs because 
somebody left the ventilator open in the family en- 
trance of her town car and she hasn't got a thing in 
the world to wear anyway (which is the way she 
wears it) except eighty or ninety evening gowns and 
a couple of hundred street dresses and not one offers 
her any protection above the tropic of Capricorn be- 
yond that that she can get with a lip stick. 

" Dollars no longer had the homing instinct. 
The minute two of them were put together they got 
on each other's nerves so that they had hysterics and 
had to go out to a cabaret or something. And when 
it came time to send Reginald Plantagenet, or 
Montmorency or little Alphonso dePeyster to col- 
lege, they woke 'em up from under the bar in the 
aristocratic club of which they were inmates only to 
find that a disagreeable-looking person with a turn- 
down collar had come into the pater's offices and 
was serving papers on him, and when the court and 
the lawyers got through with him, it would be just a 
question of how much he owed. 

" Commonly speaking, there was no such thing 
as old age. Because people got old when they 



108 r H v. r N I I V 1 1, w ak 

should liavc been wniuL;. aiul bv tho time thcv shcniUi 
have been old they were dead. 

And it's because, c^t later years, pec^ple have not 
been Builders, but W'reeking- Concerns. Their idea 
of a successfully constructed edifice was one of these 
moving picture apartment houses that is built Mon- 
day, used for people to fall out of Tuesday, and is 
blown cwer by the wind and busted all to thunder 
not later than Wednesday afternoon. Oi\ly, we 
must admit, it did look great while it lasted ! 

" And children had departed from the good old 
precepts even further than their parents. No longer 
do fathers or mothers worry their hectic lives about 
such old-fashioned folderol as twigs and trees. 
Twigs grew any old way they good-and-gol-darned 
pleased, and the trees usually wound up about the 
shape and contour of a pretzel. As for the child 
being the father of the man — well, it was a wise 
father that knew his own son even by sight. Chil- 
dren had no more regard for money than for a last 
year's bird's nest until they tried to earn some; 
when, usually, it was too late. 

'* For people were not only not building them- 
selves; but they were failing miserably to teach their 
children to build. And if there's any one thing a 
parent owes to the child he brings into the world, 
it's a fair start, and a fair chance for his white alley. 



L X '] it A V A ^ A N f; K V 8 . K C O S O M Y ] ()[) 

Why U:',i(}i a f:hi]d not to cat with hi:, knife, and fail 
to teach him the value of money ? Why teach a child 
to say, * Yes, sir,' and ' no, rna'am,' and turn him 
Ujcjsa in the world to hecome food for the stock 
brokers and the other vultures? Is it fair? Is it 
just? Is it even common, human decency? 

" In the last pocketful of ^generations, people have 
not, as a matter of fad, tried to Luild anythin;,^ at 
all. 'J hey have, like their children, merely heen 
playin;^ with the blrx:ks. i:5uildin^ requires pa- 
tience, brains and perseverance. We have all been 
too busy to take time to possess ourselves of any of 
the three. 

" Let some other poor slob do the building;. We 
should worry ! On with the dance ! I_^t joy be un- 
refined ! And away we go, skallyhooting over the 
landscape in a motor that sounds like a machine gun, 
and shoots even faster. iJorne;" What's that? 
Are we going to bother our heads over servant 
troubles, and sick cows, and tent caterpillars and 
what school the children shall go to? Not us! 
For us the little old apartment, vvith the four rooms 
and thirty-two baths; the peaceful dinner at the 
cabaret show; the quiet supper at the Midnight 
Revels; and soothing ride home in the drunken taxi- 
cab with the paretic driver; and next day up with the 
whip-poor-will and at it again! 



110 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

" Early to bed and early to rise ? Sure ! Why 
not? In bed at three a.m. and up at one p.m. 
And what could be earlier than that ? 

" A penny saved is a penny earned ? Maybe so. 
But who the Billy blazes wants to bother with 
pennies ? 

" A fool and his money are soon parted? Right 
every time. He's just the guy I'm looking for. 

"Waste not, want not? Oh, the poor pikers! 
Who wants to struggle along on a beggarly twenty- 
five thousand a year when the world is full of loose 
change just waiting for some smart lad coming 
along to pick it up ! 

'' And so we've gone along, like a flock of cow 
punchers in a frontier town, hooting and howling 
and squandering our substance in riotous living with 
no thought of the morrow beyond an occasional 
vague premonition of the head we're going to have. 
Coal Oil Johnny was supposed to have been quite a 
lad in his day, and some spender. But I opine that 
alongside us, said Kerosene Celebrity would have 
deemed himself a miser, ^nd rightly. 

" And the trouble has been not that we haven't 
any sense but just that we've been too busy to use 
it. The game has been too big, and too swift, and 
too exciting. Where one lad is riding around on a 
horse and shooting off a gun, who wants to sit home 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 111 

on the front porch and knit antimacassars ? Where 
one gentleman is parting the atmosphere in the 
middle with an eighteen cylinder automobile, who 
wants to go out for a pleasant afternoon's ride be- 
hind a team of oxen? 

'' When everybody else is staying up and having a 
party, who wants to go to bed at seven-thirty? 
When all life is a horse race, who wants to sit 
home in the kitchen playing cat's cradle with 
grandma ? 

'' When everybody you know is riding around in 
automobiles, it takes a lot of moral courage to walk; 
especially when you've got more money in the bank 
than they have, and know it, besides. 

*' It comes back to the old idea of mob psychology. 
Mobs will rise to greater heights and sink to greater 
depths than individuals ever will. Look at all the 
women you see knitting nowadays. Is it because 
women like to knit now any better than they did a 
year ago ? Is it because each individual woman has 
made up her mind that she ought to knit, and there- 
fore is doing it ? 

" Not at all. It's because some women decided 
that knitting was the thing and began to knit. 
Whereupon, mob psychology got in its work, and 
now they're all knitting. It's like a lynching. A 
lynching isn't pulled off because a lot of men make 



112 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

up their minds they're going to hang somebody. 
It's because a few do, and the rest are borne along 
in the current of their excitement, until feeling that 
excitement they become a part of that current them- 
selves. Mobs will go into a saloon and get peace- 
ably pickled ; or they'll stand outside that saloon and 
chuck rocks through it, according as the psychology 
motivates them. 

" And so it is with extravagance. A lot of peo- 
ple making darned fools of themselves inspire a lot 
of other people to do hkewise. When everybody 
is blowing in his money for a party, everybody else 
wants to do the same. 

" Come back to the cow punchers again. On the 
range, they are sober, saving, industrious. That's 
because everybody on the range is similarly sober, 
saving and industrious. 

" But turn said bunch of cow persons loose in a 
town where everybody is drinking, gambling and 
fighting, and said cow persons are in the middle of 
it in a minute! and making just as ornate, spangled 
and complicated idiots of themselves as the best of 
their compeers. 

" To be led is to be human. To be easily influ- 
enced is to be human. To be more easily influenced 
by the attractive and the pleasant than by the diffi- 
cult and the dutiful, is also to be human. It is 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 113 

easier to be foolish than to be wise. It is easier to 
be dissipated than ascetic. It is easier to be dis- 
honest than honest. It is easier to be immoral than 
moral. 

" Yet, on the other hand, it is really not so much 
more difficult to live cleanly, straightly and intelli- 
gently if one will only try. And it is much easier to 
do this, if one's friends and neighbours and ac- 
quaintances are doing it. If all men are honest, to 
be honest is not hard. If all men are hard-working, 
to work is no effort. If all men are clean, and 
straight and moral, cleanness and straightness and 
morality become the normal daily existence, hence 
are accepted as such, and lived without question. 

" And considered as a straight business proposi- 
tion, there is no comparison between the two modes 
of life. Looseness, laxness, and folly are a sucker 
play from start to finish. The little that you get is 
more than offset by all that you lose. It's like put- 
ting up a hundred dollars to win a rotten apple. If 
you win, you win nothing of value; if you lose, you 
lose, anyhow, and there you are. It's a crooked 
game, and there's no way to beat it. 

** Look at the thing clearly. 

'' Here, on the one hand, you see that well-known 
and widely-admired gentleman, Mr. Philbert J. Ex- 
travagance. To the eye, he looks great. He's all 



114 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

dressed up like a birthday cake, and as he rolls 
along the boulevard distributing largesse to the popu- 
lace, you'd think nobody was more favoured of 
fortune than he. In your heart, you envy him. 
You think it must be wonderful to have so many 
friends, so many motors, so many rich and beautiful 
wives, so many splendiferous jewels, a marble man- 
sion on Main Street, and money in every pocket ! 

"And yet, after all, is it? Is he, actually, to be 
envied, or to be pitied with a pity as deep as it is 
real? 

"Like you, he has only one brain. It's full of 
worries. He has only one stomach. It's full of 
aches. He has only one body to be carted around 
in all his expensive motors. It hurts and would like 
to stay at home only the discontent of his worried 
brain won't let it. His success is what? The 
empty fawnings of sycophants. His happiness is 
where? Burnt to the ground and no insurance. 
His health? Gone where the woodbine twineth. 
He's a hollow shell suffused of vain regrets ; a bird 
in a gilded cage, and liable to be thrown out any 
minute. 

" And it's all because his foundation is bad. Liv- 
ing beyond his means makes him worry as to how 
he's going to settle up when the time comes. 
Worrying as to how he's going to settle up ruins 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 115 

his digestion. His ruined digestion makes him so 
peevish that nobody can stand him except those that 
do it for business reasons. And those who stand 
him know he's a poor chump for doing what he's 
doing and have no use for him in the first place. 
And there you are. There you have poor Philbert 
J., coppered in the cradle and all wrong from the 
start. 

" On the other hand, consider that staunch old 
citizen, Mr. Amos P. Economy. 

** As he strolls pleasantly down Washington 
Street and nears the corner of Maple Avenue, we 
see the vigour of his step; the clearness of his eye; 
the firmness of his lips ; the pleasant smile about his 
mouth. 

"Has he troubles? If any, they are not of his 
own making; hence he wears them lightly. His 
rent is paid, and his taxes. No creditors dog his 
footsteps. He hasn't sat up late nights trying to 
spend money he hasn't got on food that isn't in the 
cook book; hence is his digestion good and his 
stomach like a child's. His friends are his friends 
not because they think they can get something out of 
him; but because they like him. His brain is free 
of worries because he doesn't do anything to worry 
it. If he rides in a motor, it is because he wants to 
and can afford it; and not because he thinks it will 



116 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

make other people think what he thinks they'll think. 
He fears no man; and no man fears him. He 
sleeps well ; eats well ; feels well ; thinks clearly. 

" And it is all because his foundation is good. 
He has builded not like an ambitious adolescent with 
a box of dominoes; but well, and carefully. His 
foundation is firm. Hence the structure of his life 
rises solidly and stands securely. Passing winds 
shake it not; nor do winter's frost and summer's 
droughts crack or warp. 

'' And now that the government has decreed that 
these two gentlemen shall enter the ring together, 
which one are you, personally, going to back? 
Which way shall we, the mob, go? Which fighter 
shall our psychology favour? For, as the country 
was ruled for a time by the psychology of extrava- 
gance; so now must it be ruled by either the one 
psychology or the other. 

''Are we for Extravagance? Or for Economy? 
It's a clear issue, ladies and gentlemen. One or the 
other must win. One or the other will win ! And 
it's up to you to decide which. 

" And, while making up your minds, let us recall 
a few salient and essential facts. 

''Extravagance has lived through all the years 
and all the ages. And it has always meant na- 
tional, as well as individual, disaster. For Ex- 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 117 

travagance is the crumbling corner-stone that makes 
for the downfall of human edifices. Even as 
Economy is the solid block that makes for perma- 
nence, Extravagance stands for waste, both human 
and material; for looseness of living and of thought; 
for the propagation of vice and the stifling of vir- 
tue ; for the breeding of folly and the race suicide of 
wisdom; for watering the weeds, and plucking the 
flowers. Extravagance, by and large, is a national 
lemon, and a sociological quince, and never done no- 
body nothing but harm nowhere. 

"You think we are, perhaps, a bit prejudiced? 
or unduly harsh? or unwarrantably condemnatory? 

" Try, then, like a conscientious lawyer in a hope- 
less case, to find one plea, one extenuating excuse, 
for Extravagance. What would it be? 

"That it is pleasant while it lasts? 

" Perhaps. And yet, take it from one who 
knows, there is no pleasure so evanescent, so fleet- 
ing and so hollow, as is that selfsame extravagance. 
It is like the pleasure that comes from other forms 
of dissipation. Great for a few minutes, but, 
fooey! what a head it leaves. 

"Cut loose! Spend money! Buy yourself a 
flock of things you're better off without with money 
you can't afford to spend. Swim in the wine, 
mingle with the women, join in the song! Wallow 



118 T H E IT N CM V I I. W A R 

in aiitoniohilos and jewels and pousse cafes and 
costly trappings! Glnt yourself with fancy foods 
and fancier friends. Sleep all day and stay up all 
night. Crock yourself all up physically, morally, 
mentally, financially, spiritually and ethnologically. 
And what have you then? 

" Remorse. That's all. Just plain old General 
R. E. Morse. Whether you play the game through 
to the end ; or whether you quit after a few hands, 
it's all the same. It's just a question of how much 
you get. 

" It's as clear, and as open, as a cross-roads with 
a signbixird on the corner. One road leads to the 
good things of life. The other to the evil. And 
you can no more find the good things on the bad 
road than you can find the bad things on the good 
road. One leads up over the hills. The other 
down through the valleys. 

** Nor will you find water moccasins on the moun- 
tains, any more than you can find the clean, pure 
air of heaven in the iridescently noisome depths of 
the swamps. 

*'And Economy is this right road. It is the 
right road not so much that it is the road itself 
that is right. It is because of the right things to 
which the road leads. As Extravagance, as a road, 
might not be so bad were it not for the bitterer 



EXTRAVAGANCE VS. ECONOMY 119 

evils that lie along its winding length. But as it 

is 

" Economy means happiness. Extravagance 
means unhappiness, and worse. And when you've 
said that, you've said it all." 



CHAPTER SIX 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 



CHAPTER SIX 

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 

" A MONG the multifarious happenings that are 

Jl\. daily contributing to keep one's American 

Angora in a state of continuous agitation," said my 

friend, *' none is at present more obvious than " 

"Yes?" I queried. 

" The foreign language press." 

He was silent a moment. 

*' Have you quite grasped all that that ques- 
tion of the foreign language press means ? " he 
asked. 

^'Why, I don't know," I answered. "I " 

" Then do it," he said, " and do it now." 

"Here are we," he went on, "the so-called Melt- 
ing Pot of the world. Yet how do we proceed to 
melt? 

" To an unprejudiced mind, it would seem that 
the proper way to melt the heterogeneous ingredi- 
ents in our world melting pot would be to light 
beneath that pot the fires of patriotism, of common 
ideals, of common purpose, of common understand- 
ing, of common sympathy and, in the white heat 

123 



124 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

of these glowing flames, fuse beyond disintegration 
the metal of our peoples. And what wouldn't melt, 
should be thrown on the slag heap. 

*'But is this what we do ? Not so that you could 
observe. Instead, when the pot gets nicely full, we 
take a peek over the edge. 

" ' Good morning, ingredients,' we say, gently. 
* Are you all there ? * 

" Some of the ingredients answer politely; but 
half of them eye us in a contemptuous manner that 
indicates that they have what George Ade would 
call a Terrible Grouch. 

Well, now that you are all in the pot,' we say, 
in a kindly voice, ' just go ahead and melt your- 
selves. That's a dear ! ' 

" And we hurry down to the Red Cross to knit 
things for the soldiers. And when, next day, we 
come back and find instead of the nicely-flowing 
molten mass that we had expected, that one side of 
the pot is only simmering, and the other is stone cold, 
and the small part that is trying to boil is full of 
rocks, and hunks of scrap iron, we're that surprised 
it's painful. 

"And yet how can we expect anything different? 
Nothing melts itself — not even your collar. Steel 
is not made by asking the ore if it would like to 
be melted. It's by throwing the ore into the pot 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 125 

and melting it whether or no. Left to itself, the 
ore would be satisfied to stay ore the rest of its life. 
It's used to being ore and it hasn't sense enough to 
want to be anything better. So that under the 
optional system, your melting pot bogs down right 
at the jump. 

** No, sir. If you're going to run a melting pot, 
you've got to get busy and run one. You've got 
to build the fire, and stoke the coals, and fill the 
pot, and empty it when it's done. And you can't 
lie down on the job a minute ! You've got to mould 
the good metal, and chuck away the dross. You've 
got to work away, early and late, and if you fall 
down on any part of the process, the whole potful 
is spoiled and not even fit for window weights. 

" And then, when comes the crucial test, and 
you need good true metal to forge to your needs, 
all you've got is a lot of ninth-rate pig iron, and 
some skimmings, combined with hunks of stuff that 
looks like iron but is really dirt. And the gent 
across the street, who has been running his pot 
intelligently, can outsell you and undersell you and 
oversell you and put you out of business in a jiffy. 

*' Running a melting pot is like running any- 
thing else. It should be done intelligently, or not 
at all. 

" And that is why we, doing our earnest best to 



126 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

throw the weight of our country behind the cause 
of world democracy, are encountering so many ob- 
stacles. Our pot was too full, our fires too low. 
Beyond this, we had in that pot a lot of ingredients 
that never should have been allowed there in 
the first place, such as paving blocks and dynamite 
and hyphens, to say nothing of Prussic acid delib- 
erately thrown in by our enemies when we weren't 
watching, to eat out the bottom of our pot and let 
the whole business down into the fire. 

" We're stoking now. We're raking the coals 
and fanning the flames. We're trying our gol- 
darndest to bring the whole mass to the boiling 
point; and the clean, pure ingredients are already 
there. But floating around in the pot to choke 
the heat and poison the contents are the scum, and 
the acid and the unmeltable ingredients that we al- 
lowed to be put there in the moments of our care- 
lessness; pro-German muck and anti-British fos- 
sils, pacifist feathers and political rags and bottles, 
all are there, filthing the clean metal of America, 
corrupting the soul-heated product of American 
hearts and American hands. 

" A pity it is. A great, grievous pity. . . . 
Yet it is the truth. The best that the best of us 
can do is being spoiled and poisoned by the spuri- 
ous material that we, in our innocence and our 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 127 

ignorance, allowed to be foisted upon us in the 
guise of honest metal. 

" However, it is one thing to make a mistake. 
. . . But it is something very different to persist 
in making the same mistake once that mistake is 
clear. You can forgive the man whose horse is 
stolen. You can sympathize with the emotional 
vagary of the man who locks the stable door after 
the horse is stolen. But what the Sam Hill are 
you going to think of the man who, after his horse 
is stolen, leaves the door open and puts in a new 
horse ? 

" For years we have been taking into this country 
Germans and Swedes and Norwegians and Rouma- 
nians and Bulgarians and Fijians and Slovacs and 
Polanders and Finns and Russians and Samoans 
and Filipinos and Argentinians and Turks and 
Arabs and Peruvians and Nicaraguans and Cos- 
sacks and Cubans and Spaniards and Slavs and 
Egyptians and Patagonians and Esquimaux and 
Mexicans and Guineas and Servians and Danes 
and Algerians and Austrians and Hungarians and 
Australasians and Colombians and Ecuadorians and 
Persians and Croatians, whatever they are. 

'' This melting pot of ours has been asked to melt 
up more different kinds of stuff than the Depart- 
ment of Mineralogy ever heard of. It's got more 



128 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

things in it than a New England Boiled Dinner, or 
a rummage sale. And to have gotten all these 
ingredients properly melted would have meant that 
every second man was a stoker and every first a 
coal miner. 

*' But instead of that, every second man has been 
an automobile manufacturer and every first an open 
market. 

*' And the result has been that so far from melt- 
ing these different ingredients, we haven't done 
anything with them at all. They have just been 
dumped in and lain there, here a pile of Armenians, 
there a bunch of Germans, over yonder a pile of 
Jews, and beyond that a chunk of Chinese. And 
New York, which has been our biggest receiving 
station, has come to take on the appearance of one 
of those dishes of hors d'oeuvres that you strike in 
Italian restaurants — sardines in one compartment, 
olives in another, sausage in a third, anchovies in a 
fourth, and so on, all separate, distinctive and in- 
dividual. And as the United States comprizes 
forty-nine states, so does each of our states com- 
prize forty-nine or more cities, and each of our 
cities forty-nine different colonies of unmixed and 
often unmixable nationalities. 

" The boy that remarked, ' In Union There is 
Strength,' admittedly remarked an orotund mouth- 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 129 

ful. But he neglected to observe also that ' In 
Disunion There is Weakness.' And forty-nine 
colonies of people in one city, each different colony 
having separate ideas, separate ideals, separate in- 
terests, separate modes of thought and of living, and 
speaking a separate language, doesn't make much 
for strength. 

" Can you see John McGraw trying to get up a 
ball team composed of eleven hundred players, 
neither one of whom knew what the other ten 
hundred and ninety-nine was talking about? How 
far would he get toward grabbing the pennant ? 

" Now in considering the whole matter from the 
broad basis of life, what is the first and most 
requisite equipment of the individual for mundane 
existence ? 

** It is thinking. 

" So far so good. 

" But how do we know that a person does, or 
does not, think ? 

'' By his conversation. 

*' So that, the first outward and visible manifesta- 
tion of thought is talking. And this is evidenced 
by the fact that long before he can navigate the 
hidden perils that beset the road from the nursery 
to his mother's room, the incipient citizen has 
learned to enunciate a handful of more or less well- 



130 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

chosen words that are perfectly understandable to 
his parents even if they are lost to posterity. 

*'The desire to eat, it is true, precedes the desire 
to think and to talk. But eating is an instinct 
of the stomach. Talking is the first instinct of the 
brain. Sometimes it is also the last, and only, as 
evidence certain of our leading pacifists and one 
of our most prominently ex ex-secretaries of state. 

" Be that as it may talking and its concomitant, 
listening, are the first fundamentals of life. And 
writing is but second-hand conversation, at best. 

" Whereby, if you would strike at the funda- 
mentals of the individual and of the race, you must 
strike first at its talking and its listening. And, 
failing to be ubiquitous enough to be able to talk 
and to listen to everybody personally, you must 
of necessity avail yourself of the written or printed 
medium. 

'' That which people read affects their brains. 
Their brains govern their opinions. Their opinions 
govern their actions. It's a simple mathematical 
calculation. One and one are two. Two and two 
are four. Four and four are eight. 

''And yet we, in this country, are entrusting the 
fundamentals of our country's life to our enemies, 
to traitors, to criminals and to fools while we our- 
selves hurry around trying to find a possible im- 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 131 

possibility or an impossible possibility with which 
to do the thing for which the instrument is at our 
hand for the taking, 

" The reading of Slavic papers written by Slavs 
for Slavs doesn't make a race of Americans. It 
perpetuates a race of Slavs living in America. The 
printing of German papers in German by Germans 
doesn't make a race of good United States citizens. 
It puts in our country a German colony, loyal to 
Germany, believing in Germany, but ready and will- 
ing and even eager to stab in the back this strange, 
outland country of America in which it lives. 

" It is all perfectly understandable. Foreign 
language papers present to their readers only the 
sentiment of foreign writers. America is not repre- 
sented. It is precisely as though in a court there 
was no counsel for the defense, but only a counsel 
for the prosecution. What chance, do you think, 
would the prisoner have under such conditions? 
And the funny part of it all is that it's our court! 

" It can be stated without fear of successful con- 
troversion that the first step toward Americanizing 
America is the abolition of the foreign language 
press. ' American news for American citizens ' 
should be our motto. And it should be lived up 
to. 

" There are those fatheaded enough to argue that 



132 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

to abolish the foreign language press would be in 
contravention to free speech. I see no such con- 
travention. Free speech is one thing. Free speech 
that nobody but the free speakers can understand 
is something entirely different. If I'm going to 
be insulted, I'd like to know what it's all about. 
The fact that a couple of red-eyed Teutons with 
no head behind the ears can stand around and gargle 
things behind my back that I can't understand has 
no more bearing on free speech than a bunch of 
children talking hog Latin behind the North Center 
school. If speech is going to be free, why not let 
us all in on it? 

" The main idea that I hear about freedom of 
speech, is like Germany's idea of the freedom of the 
seas. They want it free for Germany, and closed 
up tighter than a drum otherwise. 

" Foreign language speech never has been, and 
never can be free. It's for the select few, of 
necessity. They are the only ones that can talk, 
and understand. To be free, speech should be uni- 
versal. And the more universal it is, the freer it 
becomes. So that the argument for the freedom 
of foreign language speech defeats itself at the out- 
set. 

" And were there any argument there in the 
first place, which there isn't, consider this: 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 133 

" The United States of America has joined the 
Allies to make war for the salvation of world de- 
mocracy against the autocracy of Germany. It is 
fighting a life and death struggle against enslave- 
ment by the Hun. It is fighting to keep its men 
from slaughter, and its women from rape, its chil- 
dred from mutilation. To do this, it is mobilizing 
milHons of men and bilHons of dollars. No man's 
private fortune or private life or private rights 
count now against the welfare of the coun- 
try. Private enterprises have become govern- 
mental. Food control has become universal. 
The government has called the country to the 
colours, and the country has responded nobly, 
magnificently. 

'' And yet, on top of this, we still permit, we 
still foster the poisoning of our patriotism, the 
laxing of our morals, the fomenting of national dis- 
trust and the defeating of sympathetic understand- 
ing by the foreign language press. 

" Can you picture the Kaiser allowing any such 
thing to be pulled off in his imperial empire? 

" Despise, and deplore, and loathe, and abomi- 
nate the Kaiser as you will and must, it still will 
have to be admitted that, in the genial terminology 
of the hoi poUoi, he is a bear at efficiency and when 
it comes to getting the maximum results with the 



134 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

minimum effort, he's there four ways from the 
jack. 

" Can you imagine the Kaiser letting such stuff 
be done in his country, in war times? 

*' Picture him coming out of the imperial storage 
warehouse where he keeps his imperial uniforms, 
his imperial wife and his other imperial crosses 
some bright imperial winter morning, and starting 
down imperial Main Street on his way to the im- 
perial Great Headquarters. 

" Of a sudden, something chances to catch his 
eye. He stops and looks. 

" It is a news stand. 

" Peering coyly out between his medals and his 
mustache, the Kaiser takes an imperial peek at the 
displayed wares thereon. Then he picks up one. 

"It is the NDGRWSTZKUGHWICK CGD- 
GFTGHWDTZ. It is printed entirely in the origi- 
nal Russian, and sometimes w and y. 

" The Kaiser drops this quickly and picks up an- 
other. This one is Roumanian. He grabs an- 
other. It is Servian. Yet another. It is Japanese. 

" Does the Kaiser wait to see whether what he 
is about to do is constitutional or not? Not that 
baby! Calling a couple of gendarmes, he places 
the news stand under martial law and, grabbing 
an armful of the evidence, he boils down to the 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 135 

imperial chancellery where the Imperial Chancellor 
is imperially chancelling himself as per usual. 

" Hey ! What the Sam Hill do you mean by 
this ? " he demands hotly. 

** By what, your highness ? " asks the chancellor, 
his knees bumping together like a couple of casta- 
nets in a Spanish fandango. 

" *Do you think,' demands the Kaiser, in an im- 
perial, or sarcastic, tone, ' that I'm going to work 
myself to skin and bones trying to fight a defensive 
war that will leave me spread all over Europe, to 
say nothing of North and South America, Japan 
and China and the Malay Archipelago, and at the 
same time be sucker enough to leave a lot of guys 
at home to print things about me that I can't read ? ' 

" ' I got four fronts to take care of, to say noth- 
ing of my roof,' he says. *rd look fine leaving a 
bunch of word assassins here in Berlin to stab me 
in the base of supplies the minute my back is 
turned ! ' 

'''What are these things about anyway?' he 
howls, shaking the daily prints in the imperial chan- 
cellor's more or less proletarian visage. 

" ' I do' know,' quakes that crestfallen party, 
and I pause right here to remark that Uncle Tom's 
job was a cinch compared to that of the imperial 
chancellor, ' I can't read that kind of reading.' 



136 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

'* ' Then get someone that can,' howls the Kaiser. 
'And if he finds that any of 'em have made any 
remarks that are calculated to put a crimp in any of 
my endeavours in which God is doing the best He 
can to assist me, but having a hard time to keep up 
the pace, I'll hang 'em so high that their friends will 
have to take an aeroplane to visit 'em !' 

" And when, on sending out and getting a trans- 
lator, they find that the Potsdam Argus is remark- 
ing in English that Germany has been licked from 
the jump, hasn't got any more chance to win than 
a rabbit; and that the Cologne Pilot is advocating 
the people to lay off the new loan as Germany is 
busted flat and where's she going to get the money 
to pay up with if she gets licked; and that the 
Mannheim Mercury is full of stories of internal dis- 
sension to prove that the country is not solidly be- 
hind the war; and that the Munich Sentinel has a 
nine-column interview with Robert M. Lafolluch 
in which he says that no matter what the country 
is doing, it's wrong; and that the Limberg Gazette 
is calHng him a big piece of cheese, the Kaiser goes 
up in the air and breaks all records for altitude and 
sustained flight. 

" * But,' protests the chancellor, ' it's no more than 
America is allowing to go on there every day ! ' 

" ' If America wants to fight this war with one 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 137 

hand tied behind its back, let it ! ' hollers the Kaiser. 
* But not for Willy ! When I make war, I make 
war. And before I get through with them, 
America, or anybody else that thinks this thing is 
funny, is going to get a wallop in the nose that 
won't do 'em a bit of good. The longer America 
plays that sucker game, the better pleased I'll be. 
But when you expect me to do it, you've picked the 
wrong party.* 

" * You take a squad of the Class of Seventy- 
Six and go out and round up those jocose journal- 
ists, and take 'em for a walk. Don't bother to 
bring 'em back,' he says. ' And make 'em dig their 
own graves. There's many a gent has dug his 
grave with his teeth,' he says; * but this is my first 
recollection of it having been done with a foun- 
tain pen. Put that down, Goodwig,' he says, to his 
secretary ; ' that's a good one, I'll pull it at dinner 
to-night, and knock 'em cold; for I am witty,' he 
says, * as well as wise.' 

" And the next day you couldn't find a copy of 
the Potsdam Argus or the Cologne Pilot or the 
Mannheim Mercury or the Munich Sentinel or the 
Limberg Gazette, or of the respective editors 
thereof, with a search warrant. And the Kaiser is 
free to make war with the solid — and you might 
even say solid ivory — support of his followers. 



138 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

" Now whether or not you Hke the appHcation, 
you must admit the idea is right. AppHed to good 
influences, or evil, the principles remain the same. 
A murderer with one hand tied is crippled for at- 
tack. Similarly, an honourable man, with one hand 
tied, is crippled for self defense. And if the United 
States must fight a murderer, it should at least have 
as good a chance as the murderer that wants to 
murder it. 

*' Your Uncle Sam is hurrying into a great, an 
honourable, an unavoidable war. He is hurrying in 
with fools, theorists and cowards dragging at one 
arm, with traitors, malcontents and alien enemies 
dragging at the other. These he will have to shake 
off as soon, and as determinedly, as he can. And 
God grant that he do it both soon, and deter- 
minedly ! 

" But of the worst of his handicaps — a handicap 
that holds plumbless possibilities for corruption, for 
demoralization, for inefficiency — a handicap that 
already has meant the blood of his sons and the 
tears of his daughters — he can rid himself, and 
must rid himself. It is the foreign language press. 

" And the foreign language press should be 
stopped. There should be no waiting; no hesitat- 
ing, no delaying. It should be stopped to-day! 
Yes, now! 



THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS 139 

'' If the language of our country isn't good 
enough for these people, then our country isn't good 
enough. And if our country isn't good enough, 
they should get out. 

" We want no half Americans in this land for 
which our sons are fighting and dying! We want 
no foreign colonies of disloyal aliens in this country 
of ours for which Washington and Lincoln and 
Jefferson and Grant gave the marrow of their lives ! 

" We want honest, honourable, clean Americans 
— all American — speaking American, thinking 
American, living American ! 

'' And that we will never have so long as we 
have a foreign language press." 



CHAPTER SEVEN 



CABARETROGRESSION 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

CABARETROGRESSION 

MY friend sighed. 
" It almost looks as though we had a war 
coming to us, at that," he said, at length. 

"What? "I queried. 

" It seems a horrible thing to think that you've 
got to kill half the world to make the other half 
have any sense," he continued. " But there doesn't 
seem to be any other way." 

He turned. 

" Have you by any chance stopped in your mad, 
or American, career, during the last few years 
long enough to take a good, long look at things as 
they really were? " 

*' I've been terribly busy," I began, '' and " 

He nodded. 

" That's exactly wliat I mean," he said. " You 
haven't, nor has anybody else. You've been too 
terribly busy. It's only since we ourselves got into 
this war that you've learned that you had a brain, 
and have begun to try to use it. Before that time, 
you were terribly busy ruining your health to make 

143 



144 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

more money than you needed to buy yourself things 
that you were better off without in the first place. 

" But cheer up ! You weren't lonesome. You 
were in a merry company comprizing about one 
hundred million of people, whose main objects in 
life seemed to be darkness saving, and to support 
Henry Ford in the style to which he has so re- 
cently become accustomed. 

" In the rich, full generation that anteceded the 
year of our Lord 191 7, most of our citizens had 
become similarly afflicted. Fortune had smiled on 
us so hard that at times it looked almost as though 
she were giving us the laugh. The humblest home 
boasted its second mortgage and its Tin Lizzie while 
the mansions of the rich were distended with for- 
eign motors that looked like peripatetic conserva- 
tories, and imported indigestion in all its forms. 

" Life, from being the simple, one-lunged affair 
that our fathers knew, had become as complicated 
as the existence of a Swiss Bell Ringer with the 
hives. If a man sat down for a minute, he felt 
that he was missing something; so he got right 
up again and tried to find out what it was. And 
the commotion he made in doing it, added to the 
commotion made by the other ninety-nine million, 
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hun- 
dred and ninety-nine people who were doing the 



CABA RETROGRESSION 145 

same thing, made a strike riot look like a Sunday 
afternoon in a blind asylum. And the lost motion 
would have built a Panama Canal every three hours 
of the day and night. But the country thought it 
was happy; so there was no use arguing with it; 
any more than with a crowd of college boys that are 
biting hunks out of one another's straw hats. Both 
elements think they are enjoying themselves. So 
what's the use? 

'' To give one a correct line on anything, whether 
it's life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, there 
is but one known method. Comparison. Suppose, 
for the sake of trying to establish the true valua- 
tion of the last twenty years, we go back and take 
a look at the twenty that preceded those . . . 

" Hold onto your hat ! It's going to be a quick 
trip . . . Here we go ! . . . 

"What's that? ... Oh, that's only a horse 
car . . . What funny clothes the people wear? 
... All clothes are funny . . . The clothes 
you've got on now are just as funny to these people 
as theirs are to you . . . The only clothes that 
aren't hilariously amusing are the ones you happen 
to have on at the time; and the only reason they 
aren't is because you're used to 'em. . . . See that 
chap out buggy-riding! . . . Driving with one 
hand, too! . . . Good looking girl, . . . Couldn't 



146 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

do that where we just came from. . . . He*d 
have on a pair of maroon goggles and be trying to 
make Bangor, Maine, in three hours! 

" Here we are ! Back in the eighties, or the 
nineties, or somewhere. . . . Let's get out and 
look about a bit. 

** Something the matter ? . . . I know what you 
miss. Automobiles. . . . No. They haven't been 
invented yet . . . And everything so dark ! . . . 
Electric lights are also still unborn. . . .And so 
quiet! . . . No trolleys. . . . But it is restful, 
isn't it? . . . And all the streets look so attrac- 
tive ! . . . That's because the movies haven't been 
invented, to plaster the walls and the fences with 
the Dizzy Doings of Dotty, or the Perils of Pearl, 
or the quaint conceits of the Bloody Hand, or the 
Mystery of the Hidden Ring. 

"And the people? Of course they look funny. 
The young women have waists that would appear 
to defy the most penetrating efforts of anything 
more drastic than spaghetti; while the old ones 
have comfortable tummies on which to rest their 
hands in their leisure hours. The men run to skin 
tight pants and woven wire whiskers, technically 
known as lambrequins, or wind-sifters. Some of 
them wear long, shining mustaches, gracefully 
arched, like thos^ gf a walrus. . . . But their 



CABARETROGRESSION 147 

faces are singularly unlined; their movements slow 
and methodical and unhurried. . . .That's because 
not yet have been invented, either, those strange 
and complicated nervous disorders, like neuritis, 
and nephritis and neurasthenia, not to mention plain 
nuttiness. . . . 

" Ah, those dear, dead days. Not that they 
didn't have their drawbacks after all. Busting the 
ice in the pitcher to attain your matutinal ablutions 
wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Nor was the 
Saturday night bath, in the woodshed, just off the 
kitchen, with Estrella and Hector and Junius Brutus 
and Hannah and Eliphalet, Jr. making unkind com- 
ments on your personal pulchritude through the key- 
hole! 

" But in the main life flowed sweetly, and 
smoothly. As I recollect, outside of the large cities, 
no one was very rich, no one very poor. Twenty- 
five dollars a week was a comfortable income to 
raise a family on, and the man who had twenty-five 
thousand was the village nabob and lived in the 
largest house in town which was painted red and 
trimmed with scallops that looked as though they 
had been turned out by a drunkard with a jig-saw. 

'' People went to work early in the morning and 
went to bed early at night, and all seemed well and 
happy except farmers' wives who, trying personally 



148 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

to take care of the labour problem, occasionally 
cracked under the strain. Wispish, bent little 
women, with thin, colourless hair; strange it 
seemed for them to be the mothers of those great, 
freckled, red-fisted boys working in the corn or 
the potatoes! 

" But in the main contentment and prosperity. 
Nobody needed much money because so little money 
would buy such a lot. Eighteen cents a pound for 
steak. Twenty cents a dozen for eggs. Flour for 
four dollars a barrel. . . .And father's pants 
could be cut down for Willy without immediately 
causing the social eclipse of said scion. Estrella 
got the first hack at the ladies' shoes, with Hannah 
a happy second. As to the gents. Hector, being the 
oldest, led. Junius Brutus and Eliphalet followed 
in turn. You got them last; a little frayed at toe 
and heel but not so bad but that half an hour at 
the shoe polishing box with the paste and the dauber 
and the other concomitants wouldn't make them 
quite respectable, and the envy of Buck, and Hank, 
and Skinny Jones whom the exigencies of economy 
forced to go about with their feet clad principally 
in stone bruises and rags, on week days, saving 
their shoes for Sunday. 

" Locomotion was slow but sure. Railroad 
trains dashed along at eighteen miles an hour. 



CABARETROGRESSION 149 

Horse cars were sociably dilatory ; they were heated 
by a coal stove, in the middle of the starboard side, 
and had straw on the floor; and the conductor knew 
all the passengers personally and would sit down 
and chat with the ladies at the switches. And 
pleasure-riding was achieved behind old Dobbin, in 
the carryall, or if one were young and sportive, 
one took the colt and the side bar buggy. This 
was a favourite place for courting; except when 
the colt ran away; when one was much too busy. 

'* For amusements, one had, in summer, picnics, 
bathing in the lake, ocean or creek, boating, straw- 
berry socials, and nice long walks. Occasionally 
came a minstrel show; and once in a while in the 
large metropolises Booth and Barrett, or Jenny 
Lind, or Sol Smith Russell, or somebody. And 
the only thing that kept people up after nine thirty 
was sickness or a fire. 

" The limits of a respectable debauch in those 
days was an afternoon's sleighing on the Mill Dam, 
or who should be first to McGowan's Pass Tavern 
on runners for a magnum of champagne. There 
was also the Eden Musee. Nor must we forget 
Niblo's Garden which was a scandal in those days 
although, in retrospect, it would seem as though the 
ladies of the Kiralfy ballet were actually overdressed 
to the point of prudishness. 



150 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

" There was of course Vice, then. But Vice 
in those days was plain Vice. Bedizened, blowsy 
and blear-eyed, with run-down heels and shoddy 
skirts, she haunted the brothels of the cities; and 
one had to go there to find her . . .It was not as 
now, when she may be sitting on your right at 
dinner, or in the pew ahead, at church. . . . 

" And people, somehow, were different. 

" Grandfathers, in those days, were old parties 
that looked like the pictures of Solomon that one 
sees in the Bible. They wore waterfall whiskers 
with or without smooth upper lips, and their favour- 
ite attitude was sitting down with their hands 
clasped on the yellowed-ivory handle of an old 
cane . . . Grandmothers wore black silks and 
white caps . . . They were gentle, and kindly, 
for the most part ... I like to think they all 
were; and I am not far wrong in so thinking . . . 
And they gave one things to eat between meals, and 
had the most wonderful photograph albums that 
they kept in the dark parlour, on the marble-topped 
table, right between the wax flowers and the stuffed 
bird in the glass globe . . . And these albums 
were full of photographs of Uncle Henry's first 
cousin's aunt's sister, and Aunt Elvira's daughter's 
niece's first husband all looking very stiff and 
woodeny and as though the iron fingers of that 



CABARETROGRESSION 151 

thingumboob, that the photographer used to hold 
their heads still, were hurting them. . . . 

'' And one was never rushed for time. One 
never hurried. There was plenty of time for 
everybody — except when, in haying time, it began 
to look like rain; or when the butter was just 
coming; or when Aunt Jemima started off on her 
annual visit to her niece and got up at four o'clock 
to catch the nine thirty train; Aunt Jemima not 
being used to Odysseys, and consequently excited. 
. . . No, sir. Hurry, too, is a modern invention 
that one can find no trace of in history. Noah took 
plenty of time to build the ark. Even Marion, the 
Swamp Fox, used to go home and put in a few 
months raising yams and things between battles 
. . . Hurry was invented right between trolley 
cars and automobiles and even the creators of 
ladies' lace shoes, and dresses that hooked up the 
back and around the sides and down the middle 
and inside out, and outside in, have been powerless 
against it! 

" Those were the old days. But then, what? 

" First came the bicycle. It had one large wheel, 
with a little wheel behind, so that when you fell 
off you lit comfortably on your nose. After this 
had happened a" few times, they put the little wheel 
in front and fell off backwards. This palling, some- 



152 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

one invented the safety bicycle possessing two 
wheels of the same size. You had to fall off this 
sideways. It was considered a remarkable achieve- 
ment. 

" Ladies meanwhile accompanied one on a tri- 
cycle. It was designed along the lines of a steam 
roller and weighed about the same, though the 
noise it made was more like that of a reaper and 
binder. 

*' These inventions got people into the habit of 
hurrying a little. But it was not until the advent 
of the trolley car that they really began to hurry 
at all well. The trolley car made people really 
hurry. They had to, or get run over. Anybody 
could get out of the way of a horse car, or a 
bicycle; but a trolley car offered new difficulties. 

" Then it was that imbued with this spirit of 
hurry, they began to go further afield. And bye 
and bye they got in too much of a hurry to wait at 
switches. So they put in double tracks. And so 
many people began to travel that the conductor 
would look in and shake his head abjectly. Prac- 
tically the whole carload were strangers ! 

" Then came electric lights. 

" Prior to this time, everybody went to bed at 
sundown or shortly after; the light was so rotten 
they couldn't do anything else. Only a few extra- 



CABARETROGRESSION 153 

adventurous spirits stayed up to play old maid, or 
knit socks, by the aid of a tallow dip. 

" But with the advent of electricity, all this was 
changed. Why go to bed when by merely turning 
a button you could get a light almost as good as 
day? And so begun to start the riotous night life 
of the period — the euchre parties, and the dances at 
the Armoury where they did the Yorke, and the 
Portland Fancy and the Lancers and the White 
Wings and the Hull's Victory. Also stores could 
stay open at night. For the first time in the world's 
history, you could see what you were buying. 

" Then automobiles. With them. Hurry stuck 
out his chest, and cocked his hat and wouldn't speak 
to anybody for weeks! Automobile immediately 
became Hurry's middle name. In the old days, 
a man taking his family out for a pleasant drive 
was satisfied to go ten miles at four miles an hour, 
and have a good time. With automobiles, he had 
to do a couple of hundred miles, or he didn't know 
he'd been riding. The carefree and happy smiles 
that marked the equipagic peregrinations of other 
days vanished almost overnight. And the family 
of modern motorists, properly adorned for a pleas- 
ant trip, looked like a cross between a bunch of 
Arctic explorers, and a first line trench party ready 
for a gas attack. And finally limousines were in- 



154 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

vented so that people could ride and hardly know 
it ! Nowadays, when you see a party of the Grossly 
Rich bound for Newport by motor, you wonder 
why they don't seal themselves hermetically in 
caskets and have themselves shipped by express. 

" Thus was all the pleasure removed from riding 
and only the Hurry left. 

" Coincidentally, with all the hurry, came the 
need of more money with which to purchase all 
the complicated things that one must have to be able 
to hurry correctly and with proper eclat; for just 
to rush around like a village Red Shirt at a three 
alarm blaze was not enough. Anybody could do 
that. To hurry properly, one must be equipped. 
And all this took money. 

*' Consequently everybody started in to work 
harder. A man who formerly could make a good 
living by labouring six hours a day, found out he 
had to toil twelve. Everybody else was; so he had 
to, or get lost in the shuffle. A number of gentlemen 
got together and found out a way to beat this. By 
cheating a little, in a perfectly gentlemanly way, 
they could get results beyond those that honest toil 
would give them. So they hopped to it. And 
trusts were formed. 

" But all this sudden scrimmage for wealth, 
caused a disruption in values. Where so much 



CABARETROGRESSION 155 

money was being circulated, money quickly began 
to lose its purchasing power. And before long, 
United States Currency began to look more like 
Confederate money than the real thing. It was, 
'Henry, take a wheelbarrow load of bills and go 
down and g&t a loaf of bread,' or * Miranda, what 
did you do with that peck of greenbacks I left in 
the hall last night ? ' As everybody began to spend 
more, everybody had to have more. Not that it 
would buy any more. It wouldn't. Not that it 
made anybody any happier to have it. It didn't. 
It was only Old Man Hurry, getting in some more 
of his good licks. 

*' And it was not alone in money that he mani- 
fested himself. Oh, no, indeed ! 

" As they got to be in too much of a hurry to 
sit down, so they got to be in too much of a hurry 
to think. People can't think standing up. When 
people cease to sit, they cease to think. 

"But Old Man Hurry was ready for 'em. Seeing 
that thinking had come to be unpopular and intelli- 
gent conversation thereby a lost art, he built theatres 
for them with a two hundred dollar sign outside 
and a two dollar show inside. He gave them mov- 
ing pictures, which involved no thought on the part 
of anybody, not even the producers thereof. And 
he revived dancing; not the old, graceful forms of 



156 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

the dance that were wont to be indulged in by the 
disciples of Terpsichore, but the new forms that 
appealed both to the Tipsy and the Sick; wherein 
besotted couples grabbed each other in a sort of 
Grapevine Twist and cavorted around the floor to 
music furnished mostly by a steam heated Nubian 
and a snare drum. 

" It was one of the blessings of this form of 
dancing that long after people became too inebriated 
to stand alone, they could still keep erect by hanging 
onto each other. 

" As you have seen, hurry first crept among us 
insidiously and treacherously, riding on a bicycle, 
with a trolley car in one hand and an electric light 
in the other. With hurry, naturally, came excite- 
ment; hurry and excitement being the original Sia- 
mese twins. With excitement, as with a drug, 
came a desire for more excitement; our nerves were 
tense; we couldn't let down. 

" In the old days, when evening came, we were 
quite satisfied to spend an evening in the lamplight, 
with a book. We were satisfied because we knew 
there was nothing else to do, except go to bed, and 
it was too early for that; or go out for a walk or 
a call; and there was nowhere to walk, and we'd 
called on everybody already. 

" But with the coming of all these complicated 



CABARETROGRESSION 157 

opportunities for excitement, this was changed. 
There were so many exciting things to do that 
everybody got all excited trying to decide which 
excitement they should excite themselves with. 

" And it soon became so that the average indi- 
vidual had about as much homelife as a hammer- 
head shark, and lived it in about the same spirit. 
He tore from cereal to office; from office to lunch; 
from lunch to office; from office to dinner; from 
dinner to dance or theatre or card party. His 
wife, meanwhile, raced madly from breakfast to 
shopping, from shopping to lunch, from lunch to 
movie, from movie to dinner, and caught up with 
husband in a nose to nose finish in the stretch! 
Even the children got it. They couldn't tell you 
much about Julius Caesar or Joan of Arc; but you 
bet your life they knew all about Charlie Chaphn! 

'' And then old man Hurry pulled off his chef 
d'oeuvres, the road house and the cabaret. 

" A road house is a form of suburban saloon 
where people go to pay eighteen dollars for a dinner 
for which they'd fire the cook at home. A road 
house is usually composed of four parts discomfort, 
seven parts electric lights, thirty-two parts noise, 
and the other fifty-seven parts highway robbery. 
The proprietor of a road house is a direct descend- 
ant of road agent. It usually has a highly imagina- 



158 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

tive and original name, like the Blue Moon, or the 
Pink Lion, or the Blossom Brae, bestowed, prob- 
ably, on the same theory that makes people call one 
of those hot-beds of ignorance an Intelligence Office. 

" As for the cabaret show, the least said the bet- 
ter. It is an ideal amusement for people that can't 
read and write and that have no friends. It would 
make a great Home for the Ostracized. Provided 
you've got the price, no questions are asked, and 
the imitation poison ivy that adorns the ceiling is 
the limit. 

" It must make a first class restaurant sick at its 
stomach to see what has befallen its anciently re- 
spectable calling. 

" In the old days, when one went into a restau- 
rant, one went primarily to eat. If with a con- 
genial companion, a pleasant chat was a desired 
concomitant of the edibles. And one ate quietly, 
calmly, happily and discriminatingly. 

*'But Old Man Hurry fixed this ! With the com- 
ing of the cabaret, food was the last thing to be 
considered in a restaurant. As F. P. A. says, he 
was the boy to take the rest out of restaurant and 
put the din into dinner! 

" The first thing a customer at a cabaret restau- 
rant considers is whether or not he can get a ring 
side seat and knows the head waiter well enough 



CABARETROGRESSION 159 

to call him by his first name. The second is how 
much he is going to be robbed for. And if he 
doesn't have a toe dancer in his soup, a slide trom- 
bone blaring into one ear, and a lady with a sand- 
paper contralto and very little else asking him whose 
baby he is in the other, he feels that his whole even- 
ing has been spoiled. Usually he stays until about 
two thirty and goes home with a complexion like a 
shrimp salad. His liver has reluctantly retired 
about two hours earlier. If his wife is with him, 
they aren't speaking. 

*' Concerning the food in a cabaret, enough said 
is too much. But cocktails composed of one third 
alcohol and two thirds warm water, with a dash of 
bichloride of mercury, are supposed to gloss over all 
short-comings. 

** As regards the show, it is commonly partici- 
pated in by ladies whose structural defects preclude 
their being chosen for a regular show. Ladies with 
prognathous knees, or built along the general lines 
of a croquet wicket, need never despair as long as 
cabaret shows are de rigeur. 

" Then there is usually a young man with hair 
carefully coiffed into a resemblance of an imitation 
sealskin muff, and a Palm Beach suit that has 
merely a bowing acquaintance with the cleaned. 
Also Hawaiian girls. They come usually from the 



160 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

lower East Side, and wear much the same costume 
as does a broom. 

" Between numbers, and of afternoons, when 
ladies worn and weary of their labours of trying 
to get a $2.98 shirtwaist for $0.89 stroll in for a 
bit of feminine refreshment like a couple of boxes 
of cigarettes and a stein of gin or something, one 
is brought face to face with one of the lowest- 
known forms of animal life. It comes just between 
a microbe and a protoplasm, and is scientifically 
classified as the professional partner, or instructor, 
as the case may be; but is commonly called a Lounge 
Lizard. 

" It is a species of vermin usually between five 
and six feet tall, and wears clothes almost like a 
man's. It has a face, two eyes, a nose, a mouth 
and a skin like that of a fish's belly. It has noth- 
ing in the head except a sense of rhythm; like a 
woodpecker. Its instincts are low and predatory. 
It preys particularly on young and foolish girls, 
and why they kill gypsy moths and cockroaches and 
rattlesnakes and let it live, is a mystery yet un- 
solved. 

" I have often thought that the cabaret, best of 
anything, exemplifies to what estate had we fallen 
prior to the beginning of the war ; the war, that is, 
as far as we are concerned. 



CABARETROGRESSION 161 

^' The average person had too much of every- 
thing except sense. Time he had, and money, and 
the drugged craving for excitement in all its roots 
and most of its branches. I don't mean to say 
that all of us were that way. Poverty was still 
with us, and Respectability, and Wisdom, in spots, 
and Sedate Age. But, as a usual thing, people 
had changed. Grandfathers were not as a genera- 
tion ago. The grandfather of to-day had become 
something that the doctors had ceased to fool with 
only because of what there was in it. While grand- 
mothers were ladies that tried to look like sixteen, 
and to act like quarter past twelve. 

" Life had become encumbered of too many com- 
plexities, and too many possessions. If youVe one 
suit of clothes, you don't have to worry about what 
you'll put on. When you have sixteen, it's differ- 
ent. If you have no automobile, you're willing to 
stay at home. When you have one, you not un- 
naturally want to go somewhere. When the end 
of the week finds you broke, you don't worry about 
where you'll go over Sunday. When it finds you 
with a full purse, a steam yacht, and a dozen invi- 
tations to this place and that, naturally you try to 
utilize one or more of your possessions. Why stay 
at home, when there are so many places open? 
Why read a book when you can go down to the 



162 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

Regent or the Pleasant Hour and watch your amuse- 
ment for a dime ? Why sit and converse when you 
can dance, or play cards, or go trolley-riding, or 
motoring? 

" That was the trouble. Things were coming 
too fast for us. We tried to catch 'em all and 
muffed the bunch! We were like Mark Twain's 
young man that tried to do too much and did it. 
We were like a lot of baseball players trying to play 
the national game with fifteen balls instead of one. 
It just couldn't be done! 

'' The war has steadied us a lot; but it still has a 
long way to go. Cabarets and road houses and 
kindred asininities are still with us, and going 
strong. Waste and extravagance are still rampant; 
and Folly, though forced to go home at midnight 
instead of riding back to the flat with the milkman, 
is still ringing his bells and waggling his points. 
Gentlemen with floating kidneys are still bravely 
endeavouring to keep them afloat; and ladies that 
should know better are giving parties that would 
keep a Belgian family, children and all, in luxury 
for a year. 

"For war is a great steadier. When death 
stands above the world with outstretched hand, peo- 
ple go not quite so fast. The false glamour of arti- 
ficial pleasure loses its glow. . . . Realities, long 



CABARETROGRESSION 163 

gloomed, become again distinct. ... A son, a 
chum, a brother cut down by the bloody scythe, and 
not so glittering the bubbles in the wine, not so 
funny the alcoholically-pointed jest, not so alluring 
the blaring music or the shimmering floor . . . 
Comes more the sobered brow, the steady eye . . . 
Comes more the desire to know the mystery of life 
. . . Comes thought — quiet thought, and in the 
great helplessness of it all, the conversation that 
lies beyond words. . . . 

*' It's going to sober up many a thoughtless 
gentleman to pick up his morning paper and read: 
Anstruther, George K. Killed. 

" And ladies, in whose wisdom it has lain to think 
utterly of themselves, are going to have another 
thought to think about; one that will turn their 
champagne to gall, and their cigarettes to dust, and 
their pretty parties into deep mourning. . . . And 
God in His infinite wisdom knows the good it will 
do them ! 

*' It's a horrible thing to think that half the world 
must be maimed and slaughtered to make the other 
half think . . . But if so it must be, can't you 
who may be left, begin to think now? Or must 
the slaughter go on to the bitter, bloody end before 
you realize? 



CHAPTER EIGHT 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUM! 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

E. FLURRIBUS UNUM ! 

** ^ I ^HERE is one thing about this war," said my 
JL friend, " that people ought to begin to un- 
derstand, and to understand now: that the differ- 
ence between an autocracy and a democracy is pre- 
cisely the difference between a stripped-down racing 
automobile and a comfortable touring car; one is 
built for speed, and the other for pleasure. 

" It is to be admitted, without argument, that 
the racing car is the fastest, but who wants to ride 
in a racing car? 

" And yet, when it comes to a race, no one but 
a darned fool would bet on the touring car to win. 

" And that's precisely what so far has been the 
trouble with the war. 

" Germany, all begoggled and beoiled, with the 
mud guards taken off and no body to speak of, 
carrying no excess weight except spare gas and 
extra oil, has been piling down the boulevard at a 
hundred miles an hour; while the Allies, settled back 
all comfortable among the cushions of a large red 

167 



168 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

limousine, have been following along and wonder- 
ing why they can't catch up to her. 

" And the reason is almost too obvious to need 
explanation. It's because the respective govern- 
ments were not designed and built for identic pur- 
poses. The German machine is purely a racing 
machine; the Allied machine is purely a car for 
comfort. Hence right from the jump it ceases to 
be a race and becomes a procession. 

" It's because, also, that autocracies are the hard- 
bitten product of necessity; while democracies are 
the plushlined result of security. 

" In the beginning, all governments were autoc- 
racies. They had to be; or they got licked by, and 
merged into, the first autocracy that happened to 
notice 'em. So that they thereby became autoc- 
racies anyway. 

'' And autocracies went on being autocracies until, 
having licked everything in sight, there was no 
longer any need for them to remain autocracies; 
and out of that safely-certain sanctity, they began 
to grow careless, and ethical, and lax, and decent, 
and easy-going and altruistic; for when a man is 
busy every day fighting for his life he hasn't much 
time to sweep off the back stoop and put new wall 
paper in the front hall. Progress comes of peace. 
But efficiency comes of war. And there you are. 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 169 

" But there is one advantage that a democracy 
has over an autocracy — if it will only use it. A 
democracy can take off its touring body, strip down 
to the buff, and race with any of them; while 
an autocracy must always remain a racing machine 
and nothing else. That is the advantage a democ- 
racy has over an autocracy — if, as I say, it will only 
use it. . . . But will it? . . . That, my child, 
is the question. ... It does use it, sometimes ; but 
generally only when it is too late. . . . 

" But if it will use it, then it has both the chance 
to win the race, and the added benefit of still having 
its comfortable touring body to put back on the 
chassis after the race is won. 

" And, yes, there is one other advantage that 
democracy has over autocracy; that it is human 
nature for a man to fight better and harder and 
more intelligently for something in which he has a 
direct personal interest than for something for 
which he fights only because he has to or get him- 
self shot at sunrise. The French fight for France. 
But the Germans go to war largely because they'd 
rather face the French than their own officers; 
which puts them on the field as defensive fighters 
whichever way the battle goes. 

" And this is the thing above all others, for the 
United States to learn: that if it would be within 



170 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

whistling distance in this race at the finish, it must 
take off its touring body and strip down for busi- 
ness. If it doesn't, it's liable to find out how bitterly 
true is that old adage about to the victors belong the 
spoils. And the beautiful touring car that is now 
ours will be stripped down anyway — but not by us. 
It will be peeled down for us by the Germans and 
used as a two ton truck to help carry off silverware 
and bric-a-brac and other loot for that noble youth 
who guards the lives of his subjects with the same 
loving devotion that he would those of so many 
fish worms — we mean the Crown Prince. 

*'Why are we afraid of an autocrat, when it is, 
and will always be in our power, as a democracy, 
to get rid of an autocrat the minute we don't need 
him? An autocrat to be self-perpetuating must 
control the armed forces of an armed nation. 
America is not, nor ever will be, an armed nation; 
nor could any man control what armed forces she 
may have against their own well-being; said forces 
are too intelligent; and education is always the suc- 
cessful foeman of unjust absolutism. 

" Why are we afraid of an autocrat when every 
day we have before us countless examples of what 
autocracy, under democracy, can do ? All the best- 
conducted private enterprises, those enterprises that 
are alike our boast and our pride before the world, 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 171 

are pure autocracies. Autocracies under demo- 
cratic control, it is true; but autocracies they are, 
nevertheless. 

"Look at John Wanamaker's stores. Autoc- 
racies, pure and simple. Look at the Saturday 
Evening Post. Another autocracy. Look at the 
Pennsylvania railroad. Yet another autocracy. 
And there are as many more as the leaves of the 
tree, or the telephone book — which is by way of 
being still another beautifully conducted autocracy. 

"All these things run like well-oiled, perfectly- 
acting machines. Everybody admires them to 
death! Yet when it is suggested that the central 
government adopted this approved and demon- 
strated manner of conducting its business, thousands 
of well-meaning but peanut-headed persons all over 
the country climb up on their hind legs and begin to 
holler against autocracy! 

" And this in the face of the fact that beyond any 
possible contravention the best possible form of gov- 
ernment in the world is a benevolent autocracy; 
while the worst possible form is malevolent democ- 
racy — which is only another name for chaos. 

" But benevolent autocracy cannot be trusted 
because, at the demise of the benevolent autocrat, 
it almost invariably falls into the hands of crooks 
and grafters and rogues ; benevolent autocrats being 



172 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

exceeding few and far between; while malevolent 
democracy can't be trusted at all in the first place. 

"If you doubt this, what is the best-run and hap- 
piest family that you know? for government, after 
all, is but the extension and enlargement of the 
human family into larger groups. Isn't it the one 
where father, as the head of the house, sits at the 
top of the table and carves the duck, while mother, 
his helpmate, advises and counsels and aids him, 
taking her helpful share in all things, and Aunt 
Hannah and Uncle Henry and Jack and Lizzie and 
Maude S. and little William J. sit around the sides, 
shoving in the provender, and thinking ain't life 
swell ? 

** There's a benevolent autocracy; and sometimes 
mother has more say about things even than father, 
although she's too sensible to let him know it. 

" Isn't this better than the other family you know, 
where every time they want to do anything, mother 
says she won't, and Aunt Mehitabel wants to do 
something else, and Uncle John says hell be good- 
and-gol-darned if he will, and little Amelia is pulling 
the cat's tail while Hiram Jr. is jabbing the baby in 
the eye with one hand and pinching his leg with the 
other, and the wliole thing breaks up in a fight ? 

" Democracies are only right when all the in- 
habitants thereof will get together and allow one 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 173 

democrat to become an autocrat. The degree of 
success that a democracy obtains depends solely upon 
the amount of controlled autocracy that democracy 
contains. That the post office is well-administered 
isn't because the letter carriers all get together and 
think that maybe they'd better deliver the letters. 
It's because there is at the head of the department 
an autocrat that tells them that they'll have to de- 
liver the letters or get fired. John Wanamaker 
doesn't make a success of his stores by going down 
in the basement and asking the coal passers how 
many platinum lavalieres he'd better purchase for 
the fall trade. He buys what he darned pleases; 
while the coal passers can pass coal or quit, as the 
spirit moves. Hence is the store a democracy as 
far as the coal passers are concerned; but where 
John is involved, it's an autocracy, and an autocracy 
right. In an absolute autocracy, like Germany, the 
coal passers would be chained to the furnace; and if 
they didn't pass coal fast enough, they'd be encour- 
aged with a blacksnake whip. And their quitting 
time would come only when they were carried out 
feet first. Democracy gives them their choice of 
what they shall do; autocracy makes them do it, or 
get out of the way for somebody that can; and 
democracy again gives them the power to throw the 
autocrat in the cooler if his work should begin to 



174 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

transcend the law, or get too rough for ordinary 
consumption. 

" As, in Germany, we have a beautiful illustration 
of what too much autocracy means, so in Russia, we 
have an illustration of the almost as great evil of too 
much democracy. As too much autocracy becomes 
abuse ; so does too much democracy become anarchy. 
But Russia is a hop ahead of Germany, at that. 
For what Russia is now going through, Germany 
will have to come to. Only it may well be that 
the Germans, being educated, when once they see 
the light, will be able to read by it ; which the Rus- 
sians, never having been even to night school, can- 
not. 

" As an autocracy, even an autocracy with a 
couple of flat tires and only three cylinders work- 
ing, Russia was able to cripple along and still retain 
some degree of momentum. At any rate she still 
had a chauffeur, and a mechanician. 

" But then along came Democracy, all full of 
vodka and unused-to freedom and the liberty that is 
license. 

" * Hey! Le' me in that machine ! ' yells Democ- 
racy. 

" And Democracy gives Autocracy a push in the 
nose, and lands him in a snow-drift. Then he kicks 
out Autocracy's mechanician and climbs in himself, 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUM! 175 

and he invites all his friends to take a joy ride, and 
they all try to run it, and one man has the brake, and 
another the clutch, and another the gas, and another 
the spark, and yet another takes out the spark plugs 
to see what makes it go, and still another experi- 
ments on the two well tires with a case knife, while 
encore un autre, having heard that gasoline explodes 
when brought in communion with a flame, drops a 
lighted match in the tank to find out, which he does. 
And there you have the poor old thing to-day, stuck 
stock still, with flat tires, and the engine taken apart 
and hidden in the grass, and the chassis all burned 
up, and the environing countryside covered with 
arms and legs and broken bottles and consonants 
and things, while another autocracy, which is Ger- 
many, and efficient, comes along and tells its slaves 
to pick up the pieces for she needs some of them to 
repair her own machine, which is getting full of 
carbon, and leaking badly around the valves. 

" And it all goes to show that, as Richard Wash- 
burn Child quotes a Chinese friend, democracy is 
like a tight rope ; an attractive amusement for those 
who understand it, but apt to prove disastrous for 
those that don't. It's also like a revolver. It's 
highly effective in the hands of a trained man; but 
it's a mighty poor plaything to give the baby. Fur- 
thermore, it's like brandy; a stimulant and a medi- 



176 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

cine for those who have knowledge enough to use it ; 
but a terrible jag for those who have no better sense 
than to abuse it. And that knowledge comes only 
with brains, intelligence, education and experience. 

" Our own South, after the Civil War, was an- 
other interesting experiment in uncontrolled democ- 
racy; when the Negroes, suddenly accorded a free- 
dom for which they were not prepared, just nat- 
urally busted loose and raised hob until along came 
autocracy to put them back where they belonged and 
fit them for their new freedom by a proper course of 
education and training. Thus does efficient autoc- 
racy control inefficient democracy to be in turn 
controlled by efficient democracy. 

*' And what we now have before us in this coun- 
try, only thank God in a greatly modified degree is 
inefficient democracy as yet uncontrolled by the effi- 
cient autocracy that will mean efficient democracy. 
But while Democracy is thus experimenting on how 
to get some theoretical speed out of her impractical 
automobile, does Germany wait ? Not so you could 
observe ! 

" The Kaiser comes out in the morning, and 
climbs aboard his war machine. Von Hindenberg 
is at the wheel. 

*' * Give her the juice. Von,' says the Kaiser. 
' Step on her tail and let's get out of here.' 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 177 

** ' Right, oh, Kais,' says Von Hindenberg, and 
twenty-seven minutes later they've gone through 
Roumania and come out on the other side. And if, 
when they stop for lunch, any nosey interloper 
comes around and tries to peek into the hood, both 
Von Hindenberg and the Kaiser mutually and 
coincidentally kick him spang in the nose and he 
alights thirty-eight feet off in the poison ivy — and 
when another machine comes along he's that car-shy 
he up and beats it and you don't see him again for 
weeks ! 

*' Meanwhile the Kaiser tears around, with the 
exhaust open, carrying no excess weight but a couple 
of spare tires and an extra can of gas, and one day 
he's busting loose the echoes in Flanders, and the 
next he's coming out the big end of the Golden 
Horn, and all with no more lost motion than a ma- 
chine-gun. And if he sees Von Hindenberg begin- 
ning to slow down under the strain, he pushes him 
out and puts in Von Somebody Else; and when he 
weakens, the Kaiser cans him, and in goes Von 
Who's-Is. And all the superfluous old parties with 
whiskers and ideals and morals and decency and 
things, that want to give him advice and talk things 
over, he sticks in the Reichstag where they can sing 
themselves to sleep without bothering him or con- 
fusing his chauffeur. For he's out to make time. 



178 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

and by golly, he sure makes it ! Despise him or not, 
you've got to admit that. 

" And that's the way the Kaiser gets around. 

" But what, meanwhile, has been happening to 
your Uncle Sam ? 

" He comes down to the garage in a hurry, to get 
out his car. The Kaiser's run over Belgium, leav- 
ing her a mangled pulp ; and butted into France, and 
chased Roumania up a tree and is about to bulge into 
Russia who is sitting on top of what's left of his 
chassis with a monkey wrench in one hand and a 
pair of pliers in the other wondering whether he'd 
better take down the engine, or look over the differ- 
ential, or get a new car, or something. Also the 
Kaiser has run over a double handful of Uncle 
Sam's own children. And your uncle is as sore as a 
boil and as hot as a lady who's lost money. 

** * Gi' me my car, and give it to me quick ! * he 
says. * I'm going over there and take a wallop at 
that lad if it's my last act on earth. Nobody can 
mess up my folks like that and get away with it, and 
don't you forget it ! ' 

"Well, he waits around a while, and nobody 
brings out his car. 

"* Where's my machine anyway?' he demands, 
getting impatient. 

" * It's probably in the attic, or the cellar, or some- 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 179 

where/ says the efficient garage man. * Anyhow, 
you ain*t had it out since eighteen ninety-eight, in 
the first place.' 

" * Well, I want it now,' says your Uncle. * And 
I want it quick! I got business to attend to and I 
can't wait.' 

" I'll ask Joe if he knows where it is,' says the 
garage man. * Hey, Joe ! Have you seen the 
boss's machine around anywhere ? ' 

"But Joe hasn't seen it; so he asks Newt; and 
Newt asks somebody else; and somebody else asks 
some one else. And then they all get out and look 
around. Finally they find it, tucked away in the 
back end of the carriage house between a victoria 
and a one-horse chaise. It's full of whiskers and 
somebody's been sleeping in it. 

" Your Uncle Sam gets a peek at it, and is sorer 
than ever. 

" ' Whose job was it to take care of this thing, 
anyway ? ' he asks, excitedly. 

" * The Democrats,' says the Republicans. 

" ' The Republicans,' says the Democrats. 

"Uncle Sam sees it's no use trying to find any- 
body to blame, and there isn't any time anyway. 

" ' Well, let's get it out where we can see it,' he 
says. 

" So they all take off their coats, and roll up their 



180 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

sleeves, and shine their shoes, and shave, and comb 
their hair, and manicure their nails, and go home 
and take a bath, and then they bring it out. It looks 
like a Ford, only funnier. It's got one cylinder, and 
hardly that. And the tonneau buttons up the back, 
and somebody's been using the radiator to boil water 
in. And it weighs five hundred pounds per horse- 
power. 

" ' Do you suppose we can get it started ? ' asks 
Uncle Sam. 

" * Yes,' says Joe. 

" ' No,' says Newt. 

" * Well, can we ? ' asks your Uncle. 

" ' No,' says Joe. 

" ' Yes,' says Newt. 

" So they try. 

*' But first they need some gas. 

" ' I want some gas,' says your Uncle. 

" ' You can't have it,' says an old party with long, 
white whiskers, rubbing his eyes as though he just 
awoke from a long sleep. 

'' * Who are you anyhow ? ' demands your Uncle. 

" ' Congress,' says the strange party. ' And you 
can't get nothing except through me.' 

" ' How do I get it through you ? ' asks Uncle 
Sam. 

*' ' You ask me for it,' says Congress, smothering 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 181 



a yawn. 'And then, maybe I give it to you, and 
maybe I don't. Usually,' he explains politely, *I 
don't.' 

But I've got to have some gasoline ! ' exclaims 
your Uncle. * You must give me some ! ' 

Must ? ' says Congress, frowning a little, 
' them's harsh words, Nell. And besides, kerosene's 
much cheaper. Also I have an uncle in the kerosene 
business, in ' 

But this car won't burn kerosene,' says Uncle 
Sam, pleadingly. 

Then have it fixed so it will,' says Congress, 
' Unless you prefer tomato soup. My nephew has 

an interest in a concern that ' 

"'But look!' says Uncle Sam, pointing across 
the pond to where the Kaiser has stopped long 
enough in his favourite outdoor sport of running 
over Belgians to look over and give your Uncle a 
loud, coarse laugh. ' That feller's killing everybody 
and I've got to go after him or I can never look in 
the glass again as long as I live.' 

" Congress looks and rubs his eyes once more. 
Dearie me ! ' he says, ' when did all this hap- 
pen?' 

" ' It's been going on a long time,' says your 
Uncle. 

Strange ! ' murmurs Congress, stroking his 



182 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

whiskers caressingly. ' So you're going over there, 
are you ? ' 

" * You bet your sweet life ! * returns your Uncle. 
* Nobody can bounce all that off me and get away 
with it ! ' 

" * You really think it wise ? ' queries Congress, 
cautiously. * He looks like a tough guy — I mean a 
strangely uncouth person. And it might irritate 
him to have you ' 

" ' I'm going all right,* says your Uncle. ' But 
it isn't only me; I mean, I. The people are with me 
in this thing, and if you'll listen ' 

" Congress bends and puts his ear to the ground. 
From long practise he's got so he can do it standing 
up. 

" * I do hear a murmur,' he says. 

" Meanwhile everybody around the garage has 
had a hack at the machine. It won't go. 

" * What we need,' says the garage man, * is a man 
who understands automobiles.' 

"* Don't you?' demands Uncle Sam. 

" The garage man laughs cordially. 

" * Not yet,' answers the garage man. ' I've only 
been here six years. And besides, I never seen a 
machine before in my life.' Anyway, I don't like 
automobeels in the first place. I prefer a nice team 
of oxen.' 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 183 

"*Then how did you get the job in the first 
place ? ' demands your uncle. 

" ' I'm a deserving Prohibitionist,' says the garage 
man, with a wink. 

" Seeing he can't get anything out of the garage 
man, your Uncle calls in a lot of experts. They're 
good men, and patriotic. They leave their homes, 
and their businesses, and come to Washington full 
of high ideals and patriotism and ready to do every- 
thing in their power (and it's a lot) to help Uncle 
Sam in his great emergency. 

'' But when they get to Washington, they find that 
nobody's job is clear and nobody's clear as to his 
job. The hotels are charging eleven dollars an hour 
for a hat closet to sleep in, and seven fifty for a 
cup of weak tea. Most of the gentlemen in au- 
thority are so badly afflicted with red-tapeworms 
that their physical strength is taxed to the limit 
merely by passing the buck. Nobody seems to 
know what anybody else is doing and seems to care 
less. Over in the corner a couple of gentlemen are 
engaged in an acrimonious discussion as to whether 
solid tires are better than pneumatic; while on the 
front stoop sits an agitated party trying to figure 
how he can get people to save gasoline when they 
won't do it and he has no authority to make them. 
Everybody's talking about what kind of spark plugs 



184 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

we ought to order; while nobody's ordering the 
kind of spark plugs that we could possibly get. 

" It's a confusion thrice confused, and multiplied 
by six. And the fact that everybody's so earnestly 
willing to help only makes it that much the worse. 

" But out of the chaos at last is coming a real 
machine. And it will be a good machine; the best 
that money and brains and time can build. It has 
been delayed by false starts; by futile discussions; 
by false promises and false optimism; by lack of 
practical wisdom and executive ability. But it is 
coming. The country at last is keen and tense in 
its upbuilding. Congress long since took off its 
coat and went to work. And now our machine will 
soon be ready. 

" And when at length it comes out of its experi- 
mental stage and into its practical perfection, we've 
got to remember a lot of things. 

" We've got to remember that running a machine, 
whether it's a ninety horsepower racer or a high- 
way beetle, whether it's a war machine or a sewing 
machine, is a one man job. 

"The President of the United States, being ex 
officio commander-in-chief of the army and navy, is 
the man who automatically takes that job. 

" Hence it becomes his job, and his only. 

" But we must remember with equal clarity that 



E. FLURRIBUS UNUm! 185 

the machine belongs to us; that he is hired by us to 
drive the machine for us. Hence it is not only our 
right but our duty to demand that he drive it care- 
fully, successfully and well. He shall not drive too 
fast. On the other hand he must not drive too 
slow. If he employ incompetent mechanics, he must 
be told, and made, to fire them and get good ones. 
So long as he follows the right road, he should be 
praised. If he starts to go up side streets or down 
blind alleys, he should be blamed and corrected. 

" We should remember, too, that the fact that he 
happens to be our driver doesn't necessarily make 
him omnipotent or put a halo on him. He remains 
merely an individual citizen of the United States, 
subject to indigestion, old age and water on the 
knee just like all the rest of us. The only difference 
between him and us is that we've hired him to work 
for us for four years, at a comfortable salary, with 
house rent free. Following that, he will either be 
re-engaged, or retired to private life. Meanwhile he 
has a position of tremendous power, of limitless re- 
sponsibility, and of infinite prestige. It is a posi- 
tion to be respected, to be deferred to, to be 
honoured. But it is not to be idolized. To deify 
authority is a German trick. It has no place in an 
intelligent democracy. 

** We must give him all necessary powers to con- 



186 THE UNCIVIL WAR 

trol the machine. But we must not give him so 
much power that he can tell the rest of us to stay 
at home while he goes joy-riding, or draws the car 
up alongside the road to make speeches, or pick wild 
flowers, or something. We must give him power to 
use. And we must see that he uses it. He must 
be let alone to do things. But we must see that they 
are done. 

" For stripping our democratic touring car down 
to an autocratic racing machine is only half the 
battle. The other, and just as important, half is to 
see that that racing machine shall be efficiently 
driven. A good car badly handled becomes no bet- 
ter than a bad car. What we have got to have is a 
good car well handled if we want to win this race." 



THE END 



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